~ Pergamon Socio-Econ. Plann. Sci. Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 273-285, 1995 Copyright © 1995 ElsevierScienceLtd 0038-0121(95)00017-8 Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0038-0121/95 $9.50+ 0.00 A Delphi Study of Goals and Evaluation Criteria of State and Privately Owned Latin American Airlines WILLIAM W. COOPER j, ARMANDO GALLEGOS 2 and MICHAEL H. GRANOF I ~College and Graduate School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-1174, U.S.A. ZESAN--Escuela de Administraci6n de Negocios para Graduados, Alonso de Molina 1698, Casilla Postal 1846, Lima-100, Peru Abstract--Goals of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and Privately Owned Enterprises (POEs) are here studied along with criteria that these organizations use to evaluate performance. The study was conducted with Delphi procedures using internal auditors of Latin American airlines as panel members. No statistically significant differences appeared to distinguish between the goals reported to be important by SOEs and POEs, but substantial differences in priority occurred in the criteria used to evaluate actual performance. INTRODUCTION This paper reports results from a study of state owned and privately owned Latin American airlines. Interest originally attached to a study of the goals of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), which is an area where research has been scarce. The Latin American airlines chosen for this study also provided an opportunity for comparisons with privately owned enterprises (POEs) that operated in these regions. Cooperative arrangements were worked out that also made it possible to obtain information on the criteria used to evaluate actual performance by SOEs and POEs as a new (very natural) extension to studies of goals. A Delphi approach to this study of goals and criteria was finally decided upon for the following reasons. Site visits for in-depth interviews at all these airlines would have been impractical since the companies to be studied were headquartered in countries ranging from Mexico to Argentina. A questionnaire survey could have been conducted, of course, but this would have carried with it an assumption that the survey designers knew what questions to ask in a relatively complete and pertinent way. As we later show, this assumption proved to be questionable. This was evidenced by the numerous suggestions made by panel members for the inclusion of additional goals in round two of the Delphi review, even though the questions in round one had been developed not only from literature reviews but also after field visits and study of archival sources at the headquarters as well as interviews with company officials at some of these Latin American airlines. In any event, the authors of this study were unwilling to assume that they could formulate a relatively complete and satisfactory set of questions for use in a (one-shot) questionnaire survey to be used in companies operating in a variety of countries with different cultures, laws and regulations. They were also unwilling simply to make use of available data from already published sources and proceed to statistical (or other) analyses which evaluate airline and other SOE behavior on criteria such as cost and efficiency as either assumed goals or as assumed "over-riding" goals. (See Table 1 for a tabulation of previous studies of SOEs, most of which were conducted along the latter lines.) A choice of Delphi routines was finally effected for reasons such as the following: first, a relatively inexpensive visit to selected airline offices with accompanying reviews of company documents and SEeS 29/*-B 273