This paper investigates the holdup problem in the dynamic search market where buyers and sellers search for their trading partners and specific investments are made after match but before trade. We show that frictionless (competitive) market imposes severe limitations on attainable efficiencies: Markets with small friction make the holdup problem more serious than those with large friction beca...

One of the main purposes of the frontier literature is to estimate inefficiency. Given this objective, it is unfortunate that the issue of estimating “firm-specific” inefficiency in cross sectional context has not received much attention. To estimate firm-specific (technical) inefficiency, the standard procedure is to use the mean of the inefficiency term conditional on the entire composed erro...

Bounding the inefficiency of selfish routing has become an emerging research subject. A central result obtained in the literature is that the inefficiency of deterministic User Equilibrium (UE) is bounded and the bound is independent of network topology. This paper makes a contribution to the literature by bounding the inefficiency of the logit-based Stochastic User Equilibrium (SUE). In a stoc...

In this study we analyze the evolution of operating cost inefficiency for the English and Welsh water industry over the period 1995-2001 by estimating an heteroskedastic stochastic variable cost frontier. The main aim of this paper is to provide an overall picture of the industry cost inefficiency, as we consider both the water and sewerage companies and the smaller water only companies. The ma...

− A theoretical framework is developed for decomposing partial factor productivity and measuring technical inefficiency when the underlying technology is characterized by factor non-substitution. With Farrell’s (1957) radial index of technical inefficiency being inappropriate in this case, Russell’s (1985; 1987) non-radial indices are adapted to measure technical inefficiency in a Leontief mode...

In this paper, we provide a characterization of interim inefficiency in stochastic economies of overlapping generations under possibly sequentially incomplete markets. With respect to the established body of results in the literature, we remove the hypothesis of two-period horizons, by considering longer, though uniformly bounded, horizons for generations. The characterization exploits a suitab...