Evaluating the administrative efficiency of courts

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 how courts can be evaluated in terms of their relative administrative efficiency, using a new approach—data envelopment analysis (DEA)—first proposed by Charnes et al. [1]. The DEA is based upon the economic notion of Pareto optimality which states that a given decision making unit (DMU) is inefficient if some other DMU, or some combination of other DMUs, can produce at least the same 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. Charnes 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.     

Evaluating the impact of utility company billing plans on residential energy consumption

Many utility companies offer their customers the choice of participation in an average payment plan, which enables them to pay a fixed sum for their utility bill each month (with final settlement at the end of the billing year), instead of the conventional “pay as you go” billing procedure. Because customers on average payment plans are protected from paying large bills during peak energy-use seasons and because the information about monthly energy use and its cost is perhaps less salient to them, it was hypothesized that customers on the average payment plan would use more electricity than customers not on the plan. Using a nonequivalent control group design, the electricity consumption of a selection of customers of two utility companies (Ns = 475 and 74) was examined. The results showed that there was no evidence to support the hypothesis. Since the logic of hypothesis testing does not permit the ready acceptance of the null hypothesis, several procedural, methodological, and statistical points were made to buttress the conclusion that the average payment plans had no effect on electricity consumption.     

Personality patterns of couples practicing the temperature-rhythm method of birth control.

Psychological data was obtained from 1009 couples located in 5 countries who were practicing the temperature-rhythm method of birth control. In the U.S., survey instruments were distributed to 160 couples by mail with a 58% (92) return rate of completed questionnaires. The educational attainment of both men and women exceeded senior high school. Most wives were not gainfully employed, and 87% of the wives indicated that religious beliefs were considered important. The average couple had employed the rhythm method for 4 years and 9 months at the time of the survey. Independently, both husbands and wives completed a Byrne's Revised Repression-Sensitization scale, Rotter's I-E scale, and Attitude Toward Sex scale, a Reaction to the Temperature-Rhythm Method scale, and a sexual behavior inventory. Data indicated that the rhythm method was acceptable despite difficulties with periods of abstinence, with 84% regarding abstinence as relatively difficult or very diffiucult. Other results indicated that there was a relatively low response concordance between husbands and wives, and that couples who had pregnancies with the method or had abandoned the method had more liberal sexual attitudes than those who did not have pregnancies and continued the method.