This chapter defines the concepts of this Handbook - performance, productivity, efficiency, and profitability - and discusses the interrelations. The most prominent performance measure, total factor productivity growth, is grounded in activity analysis and related to Debreu's coefficient of...

A rich literature on the analysis of efficiency in production has developed since pioneering work of Tjalling Koopmans and George Debreu in the 1950s. This literature includes work by researchers in economics, econometrics, management science, operations research, mathematical statistics and...

This chapter discusses common methodological, theoretical and empirical choices that scholars face when undertaking productive and economic efficiency analyses. After summarizing the main results of duality theory in Section 2, we outline in Section 3 the most popular empirical methods available...

Here, we consider the problem of aggregation of efficiency and productivity indices. We will summarize some of the existing results and will derive new results for aggregation of Hicks-Moorsteen productivity indices.