The objective of this note is to analyze some implications of the model of commodity money described in Banerjee and Maskin (1996) which may seem paradoxical. In order to do this, we incorporate a general production cost structure into the model. We focus on two different results. First, the existence of technologies that make counterfeiting a commodity more difficult may exclude it from being ...

The efficiency literature, both using parametric and non-parametric methods, has been focusing mainly on cost efficiency analysis rather than on profit efficiency. In for-profit organisations, however, the measurement of profit efficiency and its decomposition into technical and allocative efficiency is particularly relevant. In this paper a newly developed method is used to measure profit effi...

We discuss how to measure allocative efficiency without presuming technical efficiency. This is relevant when it is easier to introduce reallocations than improvements of technical efficiency. We compare the approach to the traditional one of assuming technical efficiency before measuring allocative efficiency. In particular, we develop necessary and sufficient conditions on the technology to e...

This paper studies the allocative efficiency of two non-price allocation mechanisms — the lottery (random allocation) and the waiting-line auction (queue system) — for the cases where individuals possess identical time costs (the homogeneous case), and where time costs are correlated with valuations (the heterogeneous case). The relative efficiency of the two mechanisms is shown to depend criti...

Productive efficiency for Chinese hybrid and conventional rice production is estimated using a dual stochastic frontier efficiency decomposition model. Results reveal significant differences in technical and allocative efficiency between conventional and hybrid rice production, and indicate significant regional efficiency differences in hybrid rice production, but not in conventional rice produ...

The technical and allocative efficiency of broadacre farmers in a southern region of Western Australia is investigated over a three-year period. Applying data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) reveals there is some inefficiency in each year, which decreases over time. The distributions of technical efficiency in each year are positively skewed toward higher effic...

This paper specifies an empirical framework for estimating both technical and allocative efficiency, which is applied to a large panel of European banks over the years 1996 to 2003. Our methodology allows for self-consistent measurement of technical and allocative inefficiency, in an effort to address the issue known in the literature as the Greene problem. The results suggest that, on average,...

Achieving allocative and technically efficient spectrum management is a key aspect of deregulatory reforms in several OECD countries. However, reform legislation offers few clues as to how these objectives should rank when they conflict with one another. An `innocent' prior acquisition of service-neutral spectrum at an efficiently run auction may prove allocative efficient but fail to be techni...