A small-scale combined cooling and power (CCP) system usually serves district air conditioning apart from power generation purposes. The typical system consists of a gas turbine and an exhaust gas-fired absorption refrigerator. The surplus heat of the gas turbine is recovered to generate cooling energy. In this way, the CCP system has a high overall efficiency at the design point. However, the CCP system usually runs under off-design conditions because the users' demand varies frequently. The operating strategy of the gas turbine will affect the thermodynamic performance of itself and the entire CCP system. The operating strategies for gas turbines include the reducing turbine inlet temperature (TIT) and the compressor inlet air throttling (IAT). A CCP system, consisting of an OPRA gas turbine and a double effects absorption refrigerator, is investigated to identify the effects of different operating strategies. The CCP system is simulated based on the partial-load model of gas turbine and absorption refrigerator. The off-design performance of the CCP system is compared under different operating strategies. The results show that the IAT strategy is the better one. At 50% rated power output of the gas turbine, the IAT operating strategy can increase overall system efficiency by 10% compared with the TIT strategy. In general, the IAT operating strategy is suited for other gas turbines. However, the benefits of IAT should be investigated in the future, when different gas turbine is adopted. This study may provide a new operating strategy of small scale gas turbine to improve the off-design performance of CCP system. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.