A Novel City Benchmarking Methodology: Multidimensional Managerial Insight

Abstract

Benchmarking is a managerial tool that enables decision-makers to make critical inferences about their organizations from different perspectives such as their strengths and weaknesses, priorities, past and future. Benchmarking cities receives considerable research interest mainly because of its potential benefits to managers in evaluating policies and making strategic decisions. Current research on city benchmarking focuses on identifying the benchmark factors and developing methods for measuring the benchmark scores. In other words, the existing methods aim to derive city benchmark scores by combining the weighted factors and compare cities based on their respective scores. However, policymakers tend to request more detailed information to guide their policies, rather than having a simple scoring. This study aims to fill this gap with a novel benchmarking approach. The proposed approach relies on the sensitivity analysis of the multi-criteria decision-making technique adopted in benchmarking, and offers decision-makers three main outputs for each city: (i) delivering a consensual ranking that is free of decision-maker bias, (ii) indicating priority areas under which require the least effort to achieve better ranking, and (iii) revealing the relative effects of the previous policy results and projecting the future ranking if the current policies remain same. The implementation of the proposed methodology is illustrated by a case study. The case study highlights that adopting the proposed methodology is promising since it provides insightful managerial information to decision-makers.