Article ID: | iaor20031978 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 31 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 449 |
End Page Number: | 481 |
Publication Date: | Apr 2000 |
Journal: | Decision Sciences |
Authors: | Ammar Salwa, Wright Ronald, Selden Sally |
Keywords: | financial, fuzzy sets, performance |
In 1996 the Alan K. Campbell Institute in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University was awarded a grant to rate management performance of state and local governments and selected federal agencies. The project includes several parallel initiatives to evaluate government performance. This article contains a description of a multilevel fuzzy rule-based system developed to evaluate state government performance. The objective is to measure effectiveness in state financial management and produce a relative ranking of performance. The system incorporates evaluation criteria and expert judgment. It utilizes survey and other publicly available information relevant to state financial management. Fuzzy set theory is used to represent imprecision in evaluated information and judgments. The results of this evaluation are compared to a parallel journalistic effort to rank state performance. The article highlights the differences between the two approaches and outlines the advantages of the fuzzy rule-based system.