Affiliations: Department of Business Administration, University of Girona, Campus Montilivi, Girona, Catalonia, Spain
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author. Carles López, Department of Business Administration, University of Girona, Campus Montilivi, Girona, Catalonia, Spain. E-mail: clopez@dartem.cat.
Abstract: This paper addresses the need for a tool that makes use of expert opinion to determine whether individual public administration services should be outsourced. It begins by analyzing the specific characteristics of the public sector in relation to outsourcing and continues with a description of the main services, both mandatory and otherwise, provided by a local corporation, classifying them according to whether they are aimed at people, the territory or infrastructure. Fuzzy math tools are then used, by means of an endecadarian scale, to allow diverse experts to state the degree to which they agree on the possible outsourcing of a public service. In order to facilitate their decision-making, experts can offer a confidence interval of that degree. From the different intervals obtained through this process, a decision method is presented that uses the fuzzy logic tool “experton” as a basis. Several examples clarify and exemplify the method.
Keywords: Outsourcing, public sector, fuzzy logic, theory of expertons, experton’s expectation, expected value of the experton’s expectation
