Bilkent University Lecture Series – serie

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.

Fundamentals algorithms for SIMD and MIMD hypercubes are developed. These include algorithms for such problems as data broadcasting, data sum, prefix sum, shift, data circulation, data accumulation, sorting, random access reads and writes and data permutation. The fundamental algorithms are then used to obtain efficient hypercube algorithms for matrix multiplication, image processing problems such as convolution, template matching, hough transform, clustering and image processing transformation, and string editing. Most of the algorithms in this book are for hypercubes with the number of processors being a function of problems size. However, for image processing problems, the book also includes algorithms for and MIMD hypercube with a small number of processes. Experimental results on an NCUBE/77 MIMD hypercube are also presented. The book is suitable for use in a one-semester or one-quarter course on hypercube algorithms. For students with no prior exposure to parallel algorithms, it is recommended that one week will be spent on the material in chapter 1, about six weeks on chapter 2 and one week on chapter 3. The remainder of the term can be spent covering topics from the rest of the book.

This text is designed to provide a comprehensive guide to students, researchers, or consultants who wish to carry out and to interpret analyses of economic performance, with an emphasis on productivity growth. The text includes an overview of standard productivity growth measurement techniques and adaptations, and data construc­ tion procedures. It goes further, however, by expanding the tradition­ al growth accounting (index number) framework to allow consider­ ation of how different aspects of firm behavior underlying productivity growth are interrelated, how they can be measured con­ sistently in a parametric model, and how they permit a well-defined decomposition of standard productivity growth measures. These ideas are developed by considering in detail a number of underlying theoretical results and econometric issues. The impacts of various production characteristics on productivity growth trends are also evaluated by overviewing selected methodological extensions and em­ pirical evidence. More specifically, in the methodological extensions, emphasis is placed on incorporation of cost and demand characteristics, such as fixity and adjustment costs, returns to scale, and the existence of market power, into analyses of productivity growth. These character­ istics, generally disregarded in such analyses, can have very important impacts on production structure and firm behavior, and thus on economic performance. They also provide the conceptual basis for vii viii PREFACE measures that are often used independently as indicators of economic performance, such as investment, capacity utilization, and profit measures.