Abstract: Water rights market is an important way to promote the optimal allocation of water resources. The evaluation of the performance of water right market（WRM）is vital to the improvement of the market. A performance evaluation index system is established from the aspects of equity,efficiency and sustainability. The TF-IDF algorithm is improved and used to calculate the index weight. Based on the questionnaire survey and statistical data,the performance of WRM in a well-irrigation district and an irrigation district dominated by surface water in Shiyang River Basin is evaluated. The performance of WRM in the two irrigation districts is evaluated to be moderate. The WRMs performs best in sustainability and worst inequity. The WRM in the well-irrigation district performs better than that in the irrigation district dominated by surface water. The performance of WRM in the irrigation district dominated by surface water shows a downward trend from 2008 to 2012. The performance difference of WRM between the irrigation districts is caused by water rights trading level,water rights monitoring mode,irrigation water source reliability and irrigation organization mode. Water rights trading policy has an important influence on the performance of WRM. Appropriate water rights policies should be adopted according to the temporal and spatial differences of the WRM. The improved TFIDF algorithm can determine the index weight through quantitative analysis of the views of officials and scholars,which can provide new ideas for calculating the index weight.