The first is to extend the literature examining costs in higher education to a frontier cost function framework. The second goal is to determinine whether the source of funds in public higher education influences the degree of efficiencey.
Results show that larger university systems are more efficient than smaller university systems.
Also, the source of funds is important as states with the lowest and highest share of total expenditures provided by state appropriations are less efficient than states in the middle of the expenditure distribution. No other species is engaged in strategic transactions based purely on the merits of the commodities exchanged. The root cause of this distinction and its evolutionary consequences is the key question in this paper. Insights gained throughout this paper suggest that human exchange fits more neatly into the story of human evolution when viewed as an early rather than a late development. They also suggest that intelligence can never reach levels of perfection deemed unnecessary by an agent that makes strategic exchanges with genetically unrelated members of its own species.