| Sumario: | The article focuses on the technical efficiency in producing economic knowledge. During the decade of the 1970s, economists began to direct their theoretical models and quantitative skills toward an analysis of economic education. A production in economic theory is defined as the maximum amount of output that can be produced from a given stock of inputs. Hence, firms cannot produce beyond the surface. They are constrained to being either on or below the surface, with points below the surface representing technically inefficient operations. Thus, a production frontier should be estimated, and since the error terms are constrained to being equal to or greater than zero, a mathematical programming technique is an appropriate device for estimating the coefficients. Since no assumptions concerning the statistical properties of the coefficients or the error terms are made, no statistical inferences can be drawn. Since the firm must be either on or below the frontier, the estimated output must be equal to or less than the actual output. The problem then is to minimize the sum of the errors rather than the sum of the squared errors as in regression analysis. Due to the inequalities of the constraints a linear programming technique is an appropriate technique for estimating the coefficients of the coefficients vector which minimize the sum of errors
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