Regulation, Procurement, and Political Economy

该项目再次支持对监管、采购合同和政治经济学的研究。这三个主题的共同主题是公共机构和机构与私营部门组织之间的互动。拟议研究的规范性目标是描述在信息不完全、可观察性有限和可验证性不完善的环境下监管和公共政策的效率。积极的目标是解释监管政策、政府采购计划、公共支出计划和其他公共政策的选择。一个令人满意的解释必须结合政治偏好、管理政策和方案的选择和设计的公共机构的特点，以及受这些政策影响的私人各方的利益。讨论的具体实质性问题是：1)监管经济学，重点是多方模式和容易被政治机构规避的多时期监管政策；2)政府采购计划，须按年拨款和年度政策审查；以及3)政府监管和支出计划的政治经济学。本研究的研究方法是基于博弈论、微观经济学和实证政治学。尽管大多数经济行为是由公共政策和制度塑造的，但这些政策和制度通常被建模为外生的，导致预测要么不完整，要么与公共机构随后采取的政策不一致。这个项目的一个主要贡献是，通过将政治行为和经济行为视为内生的，将两者纳入经济分析。

This project renews support for research on regulation, procurement contracting, and political economy. The common theme among these three subjects is the interactions between public agencies and institutions and private sector organizations. The normative objective of the proposed research is to characterize the efficiency of regulatory and public policies in settings characterized by incomplete information, limited observability, and imperfect verifiability. The positive objective is to explain the choice of regulatory policies, government procurement programs, public expenditure programs, and other public policies. A satisfactory explanation must bring together political preferences, features of the public institutions that govern the choice and design of policies and programs, and the interests of the private parties affected by such policies. The specific substantive issues addressed are: 1) the economics of regulation with an emphasis on multiparty models and on multiperiod regulatory policies that are subject to evasion by political institutions, 2) government procurement programs that are subject to year-by-year appropriations and annual policy review, and 3) the political economy of government regulatory and expenditure programs. The approach to be taken in this study is based on game theory, microeconomics, and positive political science. Although most economic behavior is shaped by public policies and institutions, these policies and institutions are typically modeled as exogenous, resulting in predictions that are either incomplete or are inconsistent with the subsequent policies adopted by public institutions. A major contribution of this project is to incorporate political behavior into economic analysis by treating both as endogenous.