The purpose of this chapter is to review dental economics in three major areas: (i) demand for and utilisation of dental care, (ii) productivity, technical efficiency and economies of scale in dental care production, and finally (iii) economic evaluation of dental care procedures and programmes....

Diewert and Fox (2013) proposed decompositions of a Malmquist-type productivity index into explanatory factors, with a focus on extracting technical progress, technical efficiency change and returns to scale components. A major problem with their decompositions is that it may be difficult to...

The formulas of cost and allocative efficiencies of decision making units (DMUs) with positive data cannot be used for DMUs with negative data. On the other hand, these formulas are needed to analyze the productivity and performance of DMUs with negative data. To this end, this study introduces...

The agent-based approach views an organization as a collection of agents, interacting with one another in their pursuit of assigned tasks. The performance of an organization in this framework is determined by the formal and informal structures of interactions among agents, which define the lines...

Various approaches used in Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) to model endogenously determined interactions between agents are discussed. This concerns models in which agents not only (learn how to) play some (market or other) game, but also (learn to) decide with whom to do that (or not).

Considered here is direct exchange of production allowances or input factors. Motivated by practical modeling and compution, we suppose every owner or user of such items has a linear technology. The issue is whether competitive market equilibrium can be reached merely via iterated bilateral...

This paper examines the impact of information and communications technologies (ICTs) on technical production efficiency in a wide range of Italian industries. Technical efficiency, defined as the firm’s distance from the production efficiency frontier, is one important component of...

The duality between measures of economic and technical efficiency has been extensively studied in the productive efficiency analysis. This duality ensures a meaningful interpretation of technical efficiency as economic efficiency evaluated at the most favorable shadow prices. This paper...

This paper examines the impact of information and communications technologies (ICTs) on technical production efficiency in a wide range of Italian industries. Technical efficiency, defined as the firm’s distance from the production efficiency frontier, is one important component of...

In industry sectors where market prices for goods and services are unavailable, it is common to use estimated output and input distance functions to estimate rates of productivity change. It is also possible, but less common, to use estimated distance functions to estimate the normalised support...