Incorporating both economic and engineering perspectives, Steven T. Hackman addresses productivity and resource optimization in his most recent book, Production Economics: Integrating the Microeconomic and Engineering Perspectives. Hackman identifies a plethora of mathematical and computational models that can be used to measure a firm's efficiency, productivity, and performance, as well as for resource optimization. The defining topics of the book include microeconomic foundations, efficiency measurement, productivity and performance measurement, and engineering models of technology.

According to Hackman, production economists and engineers do not typically interact with each other. Commenting on how an engineer can benefit from an economist's viewpoint, Hackman states, "Production engineers should be interested in the production economists' questions and the tools they use to answer them*[and] economists should be interested in adopting the micro-level descriptions of technology used by production engineers.* In Production Economics, Hackman offers a unified, integrated point of view that bridges the gap between these two historically distinct perspectives.

Production Economics draws on lectures from Hackman's graduate course in productivity measurement and analysis at the Georgia Institute of Technology to accommodate a wide range of interests. Students and professionals in engineering, operations research, operations management, economics, and mathematics will especially be interested in Hackman's work.

Dr. Hackman is an Associate Professor at the Institute's Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He has worked as an industrial engineer and consulted on productivity improvement for several Fortune 500 Companies. Along with J.J. Bartholdi, Hackman is the co-author of Warehouse and Distribution Science. His research interests include microeconomics, productions economics, financial engineering, and logistics.

Production Economics: Integrating the Microeconomic and Engineering Perspectives was published in 2008 by Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.