Workshop title:
" Plant capacity and attainability: Exploration and remedies"

Kristiaan Kerstens, Jafar Sadeghi, Ignace Van de Woestyne


Abstract:
The output-oriented plant capacity notion has been around since more than two decades. It has mainly been applied empirically in the fishery and the hospital sectors. A problem known sinceits introduction into the literature is that it may not be attainable, in that it presupposes potentially unlimited amounts of variable inputs to determine the maximum of outputs available. This issue of the lack of attainability has never been explored. This paper fills this void both theoretically and empirically. It finds that the attainability may be problematic, and that bounds on the amounts of variable inputs may well need to be imposed.