Measuring the efficiency of highway maintenance contracting strategies: A bootstrapped non-parametric meta-frontier approach

摘要

For improving the efficiency of highway maintenance, Virginia Public-Private Transportation Act 1995 authorized the Virginia Department of Transport to establish contract with private parties for maintenance of roads. In continuation to this a private contractor took the responsibility of maintaining 25% of Virginia's interstate roadways. The ten year arrangement was based on a performance based contract with the stipulated minimum standards without suggesting any specific methods. This is in contrast to the traditional contract here the method are specified. Hence, in performance based contract, performance measurement is required to verify whether the contractor provides the level of service stipulated. In performance measurement system, the effectiveness focuses on the service level achieved while the efficiency assesses the usage of resources to achieve a level of service. The performance measures used now by VDOT are mostly for the effectiveness only. This paper proposes non-parametric performance measurement techniques which takes care of both the effectiveness and the efficiency and provides a comparison of different contracting methods as well as performance of contractors within the same type of contracting scheme. (30 refs.)