Theory of Cost and Production Functions

A sequel to his frequently cited Cost and Production Functions (1953), this book offers a unified, comprehensive treatment of these functions which underlie the economic theory of production. The approach is axiomatic for a definition of technology, by mappings of input vectors into subsets of output vectors that represent the unconstrained technical possibilities of production. To provide a completely general means of characterizing a technology, an alternative to the production function, called the Distance Function, is introduced. The duality between cost function and production function is developed by introducing a cost correspondence, showing that these two functions are given in terms of each…