Technische Ineffizienz als Ergebnis rationalen Entscheidungsverhaltens

In this paper, we discuss several approaches that explain why technical inefficiencies may result from rational decision-making. The reasons behind the rational inefficiencies discussed are (1) individuals using their discretionary space in order to maximise their own instead of their organisation's objective function, (2) input slacks having value in the sense that they can be used to produce outputs that are not yet accounted for by the enterprise's production function, (3) decision makers maximising a profit function that is – due to specific market conditions – non-monotonic with respect to the quantities of inputs and outputs involved in the production process, and (4) a manager choosing a technically inefficient combination of working pace and working time in a service production process in order to maximise his individual utility function. All these approaches demonstrate that, contrary to the assumption in traditional production theory, technical efficiency is not a prerequisite for optimality. Hence, thoughtlessly applying the traditional quantity-based efficiency criterion for the pre-selection of production alternatives may lead to suboptimal results.