We argue for a shift in the focus of modeling production from the traditional assumptions of profit maximization and cost minimization to a more general assumption of managerial utility maximization that can incorporate risk incentives into the analysis of production and recover value-maximizing...

By eliminating the influence of statistical noise, stochastic frontier techniques permit the estimation of the best-practice value of a firm's investment opportunities and the magnitude of a firm's systematic failure to achieve its best-practice market value – a gauge of the magnitude of...