ABSTRACT
Interest in the quality of urban government services comes from a number of directions. First, demand and cost analysis requires that quality be made explicit. For example, either a cost or demand function of public education is not very useful where education is an unknown mixture of various shades of poor, mediocre and excellent qualities. A second interest relates to the need for performance comparison of different governments offering a given service. Government policy with respect to service quality is a third issue. Unlike price policy, quality policy is multi-dimensional and an urban government operating on a given budget should seek efficient ways to render maximum amounts of each of the various service qualities. Finally, there is interest in better understanding temporal quality changes, if for no other reason than to adjust production and price indices for quality changes.
