Reproduction: Griffin, J. E., & Steel, M. F. J. (2007). Bayesian stochastic frontier analysis using WinBUGS.

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Griffin and Steel (2007) is a tutorial as much as a research paper. It shows how the Bayesian stochastic frontier models that van den Broeck, Koop, Osiewalski and Steel (1994) set out can be written down and estimated in WinBUGS, and its first example is the classic of the field: the costs of 123 US electric utilities in 1970, first analysed by Christensen and Greene (1976) and used by Greene (1990) and many others since. The paper prints its WinBUGS code, its priors and the posterior summaries it obtained, which makes it an unusually complete target for a reproduction.

This post reproduces the exponential and half-normal cost frontiers of that example with the bsfa package, which samples the same models by data augmentation and elicits its priors in the way the paper does.

Data-Augmentation on r-econometrics

Reproduction: Griffin, J. E., & Steel, M. F. J. (2007). Bayesian stochastic frontier analysis using WinBUGS.