Modeling the Optimization Problem of a Public University

In this paper, we examine the factors that influence the reputation or prestige of a public university. We develop a model of university behavior that indicates how the decisions made by university officials would be chosen in order to maximize their respective reputations. In doing so, we assume that reputation is enhanced by the quality of teaching and research produced as well as the service provided to the community in terms of the provision of publicly funded education services. We argue that the relative weights placed on these intermediate outputs may vary by university type as well as the means of producing them. Given the optimization problem of a university, a number of interesting conditions governing the policy variables chosen by the officials of public universities are obtained.