The basic notion underlying this monograph - budget or revenue
constrained models of production - we owe to Ronald W. Shephard, who
recognized its fundamental importance in modeling behavior in a wide
variety of settings including the service and public sector. Our
endeavor here is to extend Shephard's earlier work in several directions
while maintaining his axiomatic approach. Our contributions include an
expanded set of duality results and a general bent toward empirical
implementation: including various parameterizations, applications to
efficiency and productivity measurement, and shadow pricing. We hope to
provide those engaged in empirical work with some powerful and useful
tools which have received relatively little attention. The nature of the
material in this monograph is somewhat technical, however, the level of
mathematical difficulty is standard. Although we have tried to keep the
monograph fairly self-contained, we have also kept technical detail to a
minimum in the body of the text. Many technical extensions appear as
problems at the ends of Chapters. The reader is also referred to the
notes at the end of each chapter for references to additional
literature. A prepublication draft of this manuscript was used as
lecture notes in a graduate course in production theory at the
Department of Economics at Bilkent University. We thank our students as
well as faculty members for their patience and interest. Special thanks
go to Dean Togan, Zeynap Koksal and Ali Dogramaci for making our stay in
Ankara not only productive, but also enjoyable.