ارزیابی شاخص مالم کوئیست(MI) در کیفیت فرودگاه و تغییرات بهره‌وری

ABSTRACT Airport quality and productivity changes A Malmquist index decomposition assessment

While there is growing interest in the measurement of airport productivity world-wide (Oum et al., 2006), the literature appears to offer few studies dealing with the relationship between the level of service quality and some measure(s) of airport performance. Indeed, airports are business units engaged in the provision of a service. Clearly, then, customers’ evaluation of a facility’s quality of service is of fundamental importance to airport managers and related administration (Correia et al., 2008a,b).

Although airports generally benefit from a monopolistic position, it is important to understand that travelers’ perceptions of airport service can be an initial indictor of the related city’s ‘quality’ or attractiveness; and/or a parting impression for those who are leaving the area. That is to say, airports can be viewed as urban facilities essential to the city in which they are located (Caves and Gosling, 1999). Moreover, when the quality indicators involve factors having a direct bearing on airlines’ operative costs, they can become important elements in a given airline’s choice of hub (Adler and Berechman, 2001; Adler and Golany, 2001).

As noted, the role of service quality within an airport setting has been a focus of recent research. However, such efforts have been more concerned with the measurement of quality, and less so with its connection to the efficiency or productivity of facility operations. In the current paper, following the approach proposed by Fare et al. (1995) regarding the use of nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), we incorporate the quality aspect of services in the measurement of total factor productivity.

To the best of our knowledge, we thus offer the first attempt to fill this gap in the literature of performance measurement within the airport industry. As discussed below in some detail, our research suggests that the key factors explaining the deterioration of Italian airport productivity, in particular, are inadequate levels of technology improvement andquality of service.

The paper is structured as follows: The next section offers a brief review of the literature on airport productivity and quality analysis. In Section 3, the data set, as well the variables employed in the analysis, are presented. Section 4 discusses key issues in the measurement of quality, and presents the proposed Malmquist decomposition that incorporates a quality change component. Section 5 reviews the study’s results, while Section 6 presents the conclusion(s) and some discussion of our findings.