Plant Capacity and Attainability: Exploration and Remedies

The output-oriented plant capacity notion, which has been around for more than two decades, has been empirically applied mainly in the fishery and the hospital sectors. Since its introduction to the literature, a specified problem is that this notion may not be attainable, in that it presupposes potentially unlimited numbers of variable inputs to determine the maximum number of outputs available. However, this lack of attainability has not been explored previously. This paper fills this void both theoretically and empirically by showing that attainability may be problematic and that bounds on the numbers of variable inputs may well need to be imposed.