IMPA Publishing House launches book ‘Theory of Production’

The publisher IMPA has just released the book Theory of Production, a new volume in the collection Mathematics and Applications. The work, by Rodrigo Peñaloza and Luciano de Castro, is now available for purchase at the Institute’s Store for R$ 155.

Peñaloza holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from UnB, a master’s degree from IMPA, and a PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Castro, on the other hand, is currently a full professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Iowa, in the United States.

With 592 pages, the book presents a rigorous and accessible introduction to the theory of production, articulating mathematical foundations with a solid historical perspective. The authors explore central concepts of the area — such as the function of production, cost and profit — and use linear programming to support the marginalist logic, relating the price-quantity duality to the balance between sacrifice and choice.

The work also offers a modern view of perfect competition, presented as a condition of full appropriation, and discusses the decomposition of equilibrium prices into shadow prices, associated with costs and choices along the production chain.

Aimed at students and professors of Higher Education, Theory of Production is indicated for those who seek to understand, from a mathematical perspective, the formal bases of the economics of production.