A survey on the geometry of production models in economics (Q504344)

The paper presents a survey of some recent results on the geometry of production models in economics. Let \(f(x_1,\ldots,x_{n})\) be a production function, where \(x_1,\ldots,x_{n}\) are the factor inputs. Then, a production hypersurface is defined by \(L(x_1,\ldots,x_{n})=(x_1,\ldots,x_{n},f(x_1,\ldots,x_{n}))\), \((x_1,\ldots,x_{n})\in \mathbb{R}^{n}_{+}\). The authors present results concerning the links between some fundamental notions in the theory of production functions and the differential geometry of production hypersurfaces in Euclidian spaces. The main types of production functions and the main indicators of production, such as marginal rate of substitution, constant elasticity of substitution, return to scale, are recalled. Preliminaries on the geometry of hypersurfaces are presented. The links between homogeneous production functions, quasi-sum production functions, homothetic production functions, quasi-product production functions and the geometry of corresponding production hypersurfaces are considered.