Investigation of airports' technical efficiencies in terms of privately and publicly operated using assurance region and data envelopment analysis

Recent literature review on aviation studies indicates that most of the studies concentrate on evaluation of airport performance or airport efficiency and none of them focuses on the effects of privatization applications on airports performance. At this point, it is clear that there is a gap in the aviation literature about the impact of privatization on airports' performance and efficiency. From this point of view, the main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of airport privatization applications to airports performance and in this way, to provide a guideline to the private sector for airport privatizations. In this study, firstly, detailed information concerning privatizations is given. Secondly, why privatizations are needed in the aviation sector is discussed and some examples are given from both local and global privatization projects. Thirdly, in order to determine the effect of privatization on airport efficiency, the airports that are actively operating in Turkey by the year 2015 are divided into two groups as privately and publicly operated. Finally, efficiency analysis is applied to the data using DEA, AHP/DEA, AHP/DEA-AR and Straightforward AHP Approach methods and efficiency scores of these groups are compared to each other. In addition, obtained results are evaluated with the help of hypothesis tests to determine whether the difference between each group's efficiency score is significant or not. As a result, efficiency scores of the privately operated airports are found to be higher than that of publicly operated airports for all the methods applied. However, while the difference between the groups is insignificant for the DEA and AHP/DEA methods, it is found to be significant for AHP/DEA-AR and Straightforward AHP Approach methods, which are claimed to have higher discriminatory power than DEA and AHP/DEA methods. Keywords: Airport Privatization, Data Envelopment Analysis, Assurance Region.