Benchmarking Website Performance in the Public Sector: A Non Parametric Approach

In this paper the outcome of a benchmarking study that compares organization websites in the public sector is presented. In particular, 31 websites of Italian public universities are compared considering the website cognitive efficiency as a measure of its overall performance, i.e. usability and accessibility. Data Envelopment Analysis is performed to generate a measurement for the cognitive efficiency, while cross-efficiency is used to alleviate the weak discriminating capability of the basic DEA model, and have a ranking of sample websites. Seven university websites are 100% cognitive efficient and average efficiency is at 61.63%. Results also show that website cognitive efficiency is positively influenced by the user perceived attractiveness and negatively by the time over-consumption during navigation