Stochastic metafrontiers
研究了分组生产单元的随机前沿模型，提出用随机部分而非确定部分衡量元前沿距离，并展示了其经验重要性。
We consider the case of production units arranged into a number of groups. All units within a group choose output–input combinations from the same production possibilities set that is represented by a stochastic frontier model. The metafrontier is the envelope of the group-specific frontiers. We are interested in the metafrontier distance, which is the amount by which the group-specific frontier lies below the metafrontier.Previous work has measured the metafrontier distance using the deterministic portion of the frontier. In a stochastic frontier model, this is not appropriate. We show how to evaluate the metafrontier distance, and we demonstrate the empirical relevance of this issue.