EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

1656. A hybrid cost efficiency model under fixed and non-fixed prices: A case study on the Polish justice courts

Invited abstract in session WD-60: DEA applications in Economic Modeling, stream Data Envelopment Analysis and its applications.

Wednesday, 14:30-16:00
Room: Western LT

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Dimitrios-Georgios Sotiros
Department of Operations Research and Business Intelligence, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology
2. Magdalena Kapelko
Department of Logistics, Wroclaw University of Economics and Business
3. Sebastian Tomczak
Wroclaw University of Science and Technology

Abstract

Courts of justice, apart from handling legal matters, should pursue operating with an efficient allocation of public resources and therefore, their economic efficiency should be regularly assessed. However, the studies evaluating the efficiency of justice courts rarely focus on the economic dimension. To fill this gap, the contribution of this study is twofold. Firstly, from the methodological point of view, we propose a new hybrid cost efficiency measurement framework capable of handling exogenously fixed and non-fixed prices and allowing the latter to be endogenously optimized, which is consistent with the general functioning of justice courts. Other advantages of the proposed framework include the possibility of acquiring realistic targets for the utilized resources and for the non-fixed prices and the identification of cost-demand relationships. Secondly, from the empirical point of view, we show the applicability of this new framework in the context of Polish district courts observed over the period 2017-2021. The results show a rather low average cost and allocative efficiency values of approximately 0.4 with only 10% of the courts being efficient. Interestingly, on average, the model suggests an increase in the number of all court employees and in non-fixed salaries, while a reduction in the volume of capital is proposed. The results also suggest that the reallocation of resources can lead to a significant reduction of pending cases or even to their elimination.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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