We present estimates of inventory models based on firm level panel data and investigate whether over-simplified specification of the production technology may account for the frequent failure to find technological incentives to smooth production in the context of the standard linear-quadratic...

Electricity transmission has become the pivotal industry segment for electricity restructuring. Yet, little is known about the shape of transmission cost functions. Reasons for this can be a lack of consensus about the definition of transmission output and the complexitity of the relationship...

We present a new method for imposing and testing concavity of a cost function using asymptotic least squares, which can easily be implemented even for cost functions which are nonlinear in parameters. We provide an illustration on the basis of a (generalized) Box-Cox cost function with six...

The purpose of this study is to analyze the cost efficiency of electricity distribution systems in order to enable regulatory authorities to establish price- or revenue cap regulation regimes. The increasing use of efficiency analysis in the last decades has raised serious concerns among...

Any serious empirical study of factor substitutability has to allow the data to display complementarity as well as substitutability. The standard approach reflecting this idea is a translog specification – this is also the approach used by numerous studies analyzing the relative capital-skill...

An economic lot size problem is studied in which a single vendor supplies a single purchaser with a homogeneous product and takes a certain fraction of the used items back for remanufacturing, in exchange for a deposit transferred to the purchaser. For the given demand, productivity, fixed...

In the paper we propose an to evaluation of the environmental effects of consumption activities. The approach consists of two steps, namely (1) assignment of environmental effects to consumption activities, for which we propose to use the methods of (multidimensional) cost sharing, and (2) a...

A dynamic 'car-following' extension of the conventional economic model of traffic congestion is presented, which predicts the average cost function for trips in stationary states to be significantly different from the conventional average cost function derived from the speed-flow function. When...

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of buyer mergers, which are mergers between downstream firms from different markets. We focus on the interaction between the merger's effects on downstream efficiency and on buyer power in a setup where one manufacturer with a non-linear cost function...