Disentangle inefficiency in the production activities of Italian national libraries: A network DEA approach

Calogero Guccio (), Anna Mignosa and Ilde Rizzo

No AWP-04-2017, ACEI Working Paper Series from Association for Cultural Economics International

Abstract: n Italy, public state libraries are multi-product organizations providing divisible services to the public and preserving ancient books of great historical relevance for future generations. So they may undertake different production activities for conservation and use, which together construct a network. This paper shows the importance of considering multi-process interactions in evaluating the overall performance of public state libraries and focuses on library operations and its sub-processes. It uses a network two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to examine the relationship between the libraries’ basic inputs, intermediate measures and final outputs. The main result is that Italian public state libraries generally perform better in the first stage of conservation, but score poorly in the second stage of use. Therefore, policy advices to improve the decision-making process are derived.

Keywords: OR in service industries; libraries; cultural heritage; efficiency; network service model. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 Z11 Z18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2017-03, Revised 2017-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse and nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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