Conclusions and Suggestions for Further Research

This book has focused on the economics of the decision-making process. Specifically, we developed a variety of models of producer’s decision-making problem. In Chapter 1, we developed the primal approach where the decision maker’s problem is analyzed based on the technological envelope or production function. In Chapter 4, we developed the dual model where the decision maker’s choices are directly observed. The primary concept was that under certain conditions, a model of economic behavior consistent with an underlying technology and the optimal decisions of the producer can be estimated. Chapter 6 demonstrates how these representations (e.g., primal and dual) are affected by changes in technology and efficiency. Chapter 7 presents the estimation of economic behavior within the differential framework. Other chapters showed how empirical analysis based on these theoretical models could be used to estimate producer behavior. In each case, the issue at hand was economic behavior…