O~,IEG4 [he Irtt Jl of Mgmt S,:l Vol 10. ".o 4. pp 4q)l to 4L; Ig~2 0305-0483 '}2 041344)I-I 1S03000 Printed in Great Britain At! rlghts reserved Cop?r~gh~{~ Iq~2Pergamon PressLed Evaluating the Administrative Efficiency of Courts ARIE Y LEWIN RICHARD C MOREY Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, USA THOMAS J COOK Research Triangle Institute, USA (Received September 1981; in revised form December 198I) In addition to being held accountable for judicial decision, courts, like other public agencies, can and should be evaluated in terms of their administrative efficiency. This paper illustrates hew courts can be evaluated in terms of their relative administrative efficiency, using a new approach--data enve- lopment analysis (DEA)---first proposed by Charnes et al. [1]. The DEA is based upon the econ- omic notion of Pareto optimality which states that a given decision making unit (DMU) is ineffi- cient if some other DMU, or some combination of other DMUs, can produce at least the same r amounts of all outputs with less of some resource input and not more of any other resource. Conversely a DMU is said to be efficient if the above is not possible. Cbaraes et al. [1] generalized the usual input/output ratio measure of efficiency for a given unit in terms of a fractional linear program with fractional constraints. In the case of courts, the efficiency of any particular court is calculated by forming the ratio of a weighted sum of outputs to a weighted sum of inputs, where the weights for both outputs and inputs are to be selected in a manner that calculates the Pareto- Koopmans efficiency of the court. This paper reviews the DEA method and illustrates its application to a data base for 100 criminal superior courts in North Carolina. INTRODUCTION AT ALL LEVELS of government, one hears the charge that public agencies can and should be held accountable for the services they provide; criminal courts are not immune to these demands. In addition to being held account- able for judicial decisions, courts, like other public agencies, must compete for resources in a period dominated by resource scarcity. By all indications, the period of abundant and easily available slack resources is over; inflation, coupled with the philosophy of cutback man- agement, signals a future where the efficient Technical efficiency as we apply it in this paper can be contrasted to aUocative efficiency which is concerned with the right mix of inputs given the prices of the inputs or price efficiency which is concerned with the right mix of outputs to maximize a given objective. allocation of court resources will become a major concern. This paper presents a new approach for measuring resource allocation efficiency--data envelopment analysis (DEA). We will illustrate the administrative application of the approach to resource allocation decisions within an adult criminal court system and discuss the utility of the approach to other not-for-profit, public sector organizations. Throughout the dis- cussion we will use the concept of 'administra- tive efficiency' to refer to the technical effi- ciency of the courts in achieving the disposition of criminal cases, given certain levels of resources and other input factors. 1 In other words, the perspective of this paper is adminis- trative efficiency (i.e. the administrator of the courts and the taxpayers of the state). However the method can also incorporate the perspec- 401