2026-04-14T13:55:47Zhttps://uvadoc.uva.es/oai/request

oai:uvadoc.uva.es:10324/758922025-06-04T19:06:09Zcom_10324_35294com_10324_952com_10324_894col_10324_35295

Mocholí Arce, Manuel Sala Garrido, Ramón Maziotis, Alexandros Molinos Senante, María 2025-06-04T13:07:08Z 2025-06-04T13:07:08Z 2025 Water Resources Management, 2025. 0920-4741 https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/75892 10.1007/s11269-025-04126-5 Water Resources Management 1573-1650 Water utilities provide water and sanitation services in monopolistic conditions. Hence, assessing their performance through benchmarking is crucial for proper regulation. This research addresses the limitations of self-evaluation Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models commonly used for benchmarking water utilities’ efficiency. Given that these mod- els often lead to overestimated efficiency scores, our study introduces a cross-efficiency analysis framework integrating both self and peer-evaluation perspectives. This innovative approach, applied to a representative sample of Chilean water utilities, uniquely consid- ers unplanned water supply interruptions and sewerage blockages as undesirable outputs, emphasizing service continuity. Average techno-economic efficiency scores based on self- evaluation, and peer-evaluation were 0.681 and 0.388, respectively. Hence, significant techno-economic efficiency overestimations in self-evaluation scores are evident, with implications for regulatory challenges and potential service quality compromises. The data also highlights a considerable opportunity for improvement in water and sanitation continuity in Chilean water utilities. The findings not only shine a spotlight on the inherent biases of prevalent benchmarking techniques but also highlight a substantial avenue for bolstering water and sanitation service continuity within water utilities. eng info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2025 The Author(s) Atribución 4.0 Internacional Techno-economic efficiency of water utilities: a peer-evaluation estimation info:eu-repo/semantics/article