In recent years, performance measurement has become the focus of attention in a variety of public sector fields. Unfortunately, too little has been done to develop valid operational definitions of performance, or to identify the weaknesses and biases inherent m certain types of performance...

In a recent article in Management Science, Savas [Savas, E. S. 1978. On equity in providing public services. Management Sci. 24 (8, April) 800-808.] discusses performance measures in the provision of public services, states that it is difficult, but not impossible, to develop measures for...

The authors show that even when drug tests are extremely accurate by conventional measures, under some circumstances they will yield a high “false accusation rate†(that is, a high percentage of those testing positive for drugs will not have drugs in their systems). For example, if a...

This paper describes a statistical method for estimating data envelopment analysis (DEA) score confidence intervals for individual organizations or other entities. This method applies statistical panel data analysis, which provides proven and powerful methodologies for diagnostic testing and for...

The authors show that even when drug tests are extremely accurate by conventional measures, under some circumstances they will yield a high "false accusation rate" (that is, a high percentage of those testing positive for drugs will not have drugs in their systems). For example, if a...

We show that an organization's technical efficiency scores are biased downward by linear aggregation of the quantities of the same type of output that are produced by multiple subunits (intra-output aggregation). We expand the models of Fare et al. (2002, 2004) and Barnum and Gleason (2005) to...