Measuring Efficiency Considering Efficacy, Fairness and Uncertainty: Current Trends in Methods, Practice and Policies

Dear Colleagues,

Since time, the allocation of public resources has been an important problem studied extensively in economics, social sciences, and management.

Both economists and policy makers have generally privileged the search for efficiency in the allocation of resources. So, the big issue of the political debate in many developed countries has been (and actually still is) where to cut government expenditure at the central and local level. The rationale behind such idea is that spending cuts can relief or even strengthen the country economy.

This major focus on efficiency has raised criticism from those who believe that issues like equality, fairness, efficacy merit the same attention. However, choosing the optimal allocation requires that multiple performance indicators and perspectives are taken into account: efficiency from the perspective of the government, fairness from the point of view of the consumers, and profit from the perspective of the company that offers services to consumers against payment of a tariff.

A fairness-efficiency tradeoff may exist whenever resource allocation simultaneously increases productive efficiency and decreases distributive equity, or vice versa. Similarly, an efficacy-efficiency tradeoff exists when resource allocation increases efficacy, i.e. market revenue, but decreases productive efficiency, or vice versa. In both cases, such tradeoffs may prevent the actors from achieving their production possibility frontier.

This special issue will collect papers whose aim is to shed light on the measurement of efficiency in the presence of such tradeoffs and the way the search for efficiency can be reconciled with the need to improve fairness and efficacy, even in a world of increasing uncertainty. Particularly, it will increase understanding about current methods, practice and policies implemented to measure efficiency taking into account fairness, efficacy and uncertainty.

Authors from different fields, such as economics, management, engineering, psychology, social sciences, political science, etc. are invited to submit their studies. All the theoretical, methodological and practical studies are accepted in this issue.

Prof. Corrado lo Storto
Prof. Anatoliy G. Goncharuk
Guest Editors

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• equitable, efficacious and efficient allocation of resources
• design of the “right” objective for a given resource allocation problem
• meaning and measurement of efficacy, efficiency and fairness
• appropriate measures of efficiency, efficacy and fairness in the public sector
• metrics for measuring the efficiency-efficacy-fairness tradeoff
• methods and techniques to measure efficiency
• methods and common practice for balancing the efficiency-efficacy-fairness tradeoff
• cost-benefit analysis under uncertainty