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 presence of an open source software community has provided firms with a non-monetary compensation dimension: the firm can substitute wages for the flexibility it gives its programmers to participate in open source projects. The problem for the software firm is to determine the optimal extent...

The paper concerns research and improvement of production processes in one of the European companies in the rubber industryThe company did not allow the name or country to be given.. The main goal is to improve the production process of the thermo-plastics obtained from polymer materials on the...

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...

This chapter discusses the potential of the agent-based computational economics approach for the analysis of processes of innovation and technological change. It is argued that, on the one hand, several genuine properties of innovation processes make the possibilities offered by agent-based...

In very different fields of economics, economic inference and policy evaluation require economists to parametrize a production function that links measures of input factors to measures of output. While doing so, strong assumptions are implicitly made about microeconomic variables governing the...

Improving productivity among microenterprises is important, especially in low-income countries where market imperfections are pervasive, and resources are scarce. Relaxing credit constraints can increase the productivity of microenterprises. Using a field experiment involving agricultural...

The development process and technological improvements since the industrial revolution are characterized by substantial increases in the quantity and variety of tools/machines/materials adopted in production. It is difficult to reject empirically that proliferation of tools variety is the...

Why is it that adopting new technologies takes so long and costs so much? Clearly, firms do not know all the details necessary to implement a complex technology efficiently; learning these details requires extensive search. However, this explanation has a problem: even limited search may be so...