Estimation of smooth monotone frontier function under stochastic frontier model

Abstract

When measuring productive efficiency, often it is necessary to have knowledge of the production frontier function that shows the maximum possible output of production units as a function of inputs. Canonical parametric forms of the frontier function were initially considered under the framework of stochastic frontier model; however, several additional nonparametric methods have been developed over the last decade. Efforts have been recently made to impose shape constraints such as monotonicity and concavity on the nonparametric estimation of the frontier function; however, most existing methods along that direction suffer from unnecessary non-smooth points of the frontier function. In this paper, we propose methods to estimate the smooth frontier function with monotonicity for stochastic frontier models and investigate the effect of imposing a monotonicity constraint into the estimation of the frontier function and the finite dimensional parameters of the model. Simulation studies suggest that imposing the constraint provide better performance to estimate the frontier function, especially when the sample size is small or moderate. However, no apparent gain was observed concerning the estimation of the parameters of the error distribution regardless of sample size.