Measurement of the Economic Efficiency of Central‐Fabrication‐versus Carcass‐Meat‐Handling Systems

Relative economic efficiency is measured for a selected sample of retail meat departments using the UOP (unit output price) profit model developed by Lau and Yotopoulos. The analysis suggests that central fabrication is currently more efficient for some, but not all, independent retail meat departments. The analysis also suggests that the relatively new UOP profit model is superior to the more traditional Farrell linear programming technique for evaluating relative efficiency.