Adjusting for Perception Bias in Citizens’ Subjective Evaluations: A Production Function Perspective

Citizen surveys have been increasingly employed to evaluate the outcome of public service delivery. However, the effects of respondents’ demographic characteristics on their subjective evaluations inevitably raise questions about the fairness of such investigations. This study views the accumulation of citizen perception as a production process and proposes a generic model for adjusting for demographic effects from a production function perspective. The paper uses household survey data from the World Bank for five of China’s cities to examine the efficacy of the proposed model. The results confirm that most demographic characteristics, including age, health status, education, and sex, consistently have a statistically significant effect on satisfaction scores. Furthermore, after I adjust for respondent characteristics, the city rankings change in some satisfaction settings, making the rankings more reflective of reality. The power of the proposed model is further justified by adjusting the satisfaction scores of five cities’ households for the TV program Spring Festival Party, an identical service to each household that is provided by the single public service agent, CCTV.