Decision Sciences Journal
Volume 31, Number 2
Spring 2000
Ranking State Financial Management: A Multilevel Fuzzy
Rule-based System
Salwa Ammar and Ronald Wright
Department of Business Administration, Le Moyne College, Syracuse,
NY 13214, email: ammars@palm.lemoyne.edu & wright@palm.lemoyne.edu
Sally Selden
Department of Public Administration, Syracuse University, Syracuse,
NY 13244
Abstract. In 1996 the Alan K. Campbell Institute in
the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse
University was awarded a grant to rate management performance
of state and local governments and selected federal agencies.
The project includes several parallel initiatives to evaluate
government performance. This article contains a description of
a multilevel fuzzy rule-based system developed to evaluate state
government performance. The objective is to measure effectiveness
in state financial management and produce a relative ranking
of performance. The system incorporates evaluation criteria and
expert judgment. It utilizes survey and other publicly available
information relevant to state financial management. Fuzzy set
theory is used to represent imprecision in evaluated information
and judgments. The results of this evaluation are compared to
a parallel journalistic effort to rank state performance. The
article highlights the differences between the two approaches
and outlines the advantages of the fuzzy rule-based system.
Subject Areas: Budget and Planning, Fuzzy Set Theory,
Performance Evaluation, and Rule-based System. |