Application of expert systems to the evaluation of managerial performance in public enterprises of developing countries

One of the most difficult problems encountered in the performance evaluation of public enterprise managers is the development of a mathematical representation of performance which includes their social, economic and financial objectives. This paper examines the performance function trade-off between increasing the number of criteria and the level of difficulty in the assignment of subjective weights for each criteria and postulates the use of expert systems to eliminate the trade-off. It presents the results of an experiment designed to test the applicability of expert systems to performance evaluation using an expert system shell to replicate the enterprise classification performed by the Pakistani Evaluation System. On the basis of a successful replication, the paper suggests a methodology to evaluate public enterprise managers without the requirement of developing explicit mathematical representations of performance.