Economic policy is commonly treated as a vehicle for selecting among possible allocative outcomes within an economy. An economy, however, is a complex network of relationships whose patterns can be understood but whose details can be neither predicted nor controlled. Because of this complexity, allocative outcomes are not direct objects of choice. Allocative outcomes are simply emergent consequ...

The present paper seeks to deal with the issue of technical and economic efficiency of rice producers in the Kou valley, located in the region of the high basins in the western part of Burkina Faso. The stochastic frontier approach was used to estimate the production function, from a CobbDouglas stochastic frontier function and its dual which allow the estimation of the technical, allocative an...

The financial system of the United States contains two large subsystems. The function of the first, generally referred to as monetary policy, is to control the total volume of credit for the purpose of aggregate economic stabilization. The second sub-system, which has no name, consists of a maze of regulations, institutions and tax practices designed to influence the allocation of credit, and h...

This paper proposes a bridge between the Herding literature and the literature on Rational Expectations under asymmetric information. In particular we examine how the presence of discrete investment decisions affects the properties of a market equilibrium where information is costly to acquire. We choose to focus on the case where individual decisions are discrete since this appears to be the k...

A “higher-order” liability regime—in which a plaintiff and a defendant have a sequence of alternating options to take (or to put) a disputed entitlement —can enhance allocative efficiency by harnessing the private information possessed by both litigants. Indeed, infinite order liability regimes can, as a theoretical matter, assure first-best efficiency. Such iterated taking regimes have, howeve...

This study addresses the issue of efficiency in the treatment and rehabilitation of hip fracture patients in Sweden. The treatment and rehabilitation of hip fracture patients is defined in terms of a hip fracture treatment process where resources in orthopaedics and after care are used for “producing“ operated patients with a given survival and residence the year after fracture. Each hip fractu...