Pluralistic views of performance

Regulatory efforts within the UK water industry in recent years have been predominated by the concern for measuring the cost efficiencies of the privatized companies. More recent regulatory work, however, has moved away from the assessment of performance on the strict basis of financial indicators to a multidimensional perspective that includes quality concerns, combining the interests of management, shareholders and consumers in the assessment procedures. This study adopts a similar perspective, describing a multi‐stakeholder performance model for UK water companies, which develops an understanding of performance improvement in financial and quality terms. Thus, the interests of shareholders and consumers are addressed – and differentiated – within a single performance frontier framework. The ways in which one approaches different regions of the frontier characterizes the different stakeholder perspectives, entertains the possibility of trade‐offs between them, and provides the basis of determining “balanced” positions in performance space.