Resource Allocation in Public Healthcare: A Team-DEA Model

This paper combines the theory of teams and data envelopment analysis (DEA) to design a mechanism to optimally allocate resources in public healthcare. A statutory authority and the public hospitals under its governance are interpreted as a team, the members of which seek to operate efficiently under the shared institutional constraint that public healthcare is a public good. The individual public hospital exploits DEA to maximize own-payoff, subject to the team-condition that the payoff of each other public hospital does not fall and thereby subtract from the external effects created by the public supply of healthcare. The resulting team-DEA solution, which is shown to be both an individually-efficient and team-satisficing equilibrium and to be computable in terms of a convergent algorithm, can then be applied by the authority to determine the optimal allocation of resources in public healthcare. A case based on Chinese data is presented to illustrate the team-DEA model’s ready operationalization and computation.