Performance evaluation of university extension providers: A frontier approach for ordered response data

A frontier model is used to evaluate the performance of extension service providers in the US land grant university system when providing assistance to organic producers. Performance efficiency indicates the effectiveness of extension agents in achieving the highest evaluations from their clientele conditioned on the farm level characteristics and environmental resources and constraints of the organic farmers. Mean performance efficiency of the extension agents is above 0.69 for entire sample with top performing extension service experts outperforming the average providers by about 44%. Performance efficiency, or advisory outcomes that are below the best that extension could provide, are not significantly reduced when extension agents deal with difficult evaluation situations.