Resource Allocation in Public Healthcare: A Team-DEA Model

摘要

This paper combines the theory of teams and data envelopment analysis (DEA) to design a mechanism to optimally allocate resources in public healthcare.A statutory authority and the public hospitals under its governance are interpreted as a team,the members of which seek to operate efficiently under the shared institutional constraint that public healthcare is a public good.The individual public hospital exploits DEA to maximize own-payoff,subject to the team-condition that the payoff of each other public hospital does not fall and thereby subtract from the external effects created by the public supply of healthcare.The resulting team-DEA solution,which is shown to be both an individuallyefficient and team-satisficing equilibrium and to be computable in terms of a convergent algorithm,can then be applied by the authority to determine the optimal allocation of resources in public healthcare.A case based on Chinese data is presented to illustrate the team-DEA model's ready operationalization and computation.