Collaborative Research: Effectiveness, Control, and Competence in Public Agencies

本项目将加强和检验公共行政中“能力-控制”辩证法的新博弈论模型。具体而言，它将探讨晋升机会如何影响官僚发展政策和政策执行专门知识的倾向。作为该项目的一部分，研究小组将开发一个新的、公开的联邦机构数据库，使他们能够测试关于晋升标准和机构能力之间权衡的假设。这项工作的结果将提供洞察力如何激励政府机构影响的专业知识，能力，并最终，这些机构的业绩。在公共竞技场中，这是一个关键问题：各机构必须对公众意愿作出反应，但没有专门知识的政府缺乏向公民提供有效服务的能力。这些见解也与非公共组织有关，因为在许多情况下，委托人的干预和代理人的执行之间的权衡是常见的。

This project will enhance and test new game theoretic models of a "Competence-Control" dialectic in public administration. Specifically, it will explore how opportunities for promotion affect the propensities of bureaucrats to develop policy and policy-implementation expertise. As part of this project, the research team will develop a new, publicly available database of federal agencies that will allow them to test hypotheses about tradeoffs between promotion criteria and agency competence. Results from this work will provide insight into how incentives in government agencies affect the expertise, competence, and, ultimately, performance of those agencies. In the public arena, this is a crucial question: agencies must be responsive to the public will, yet a government without expertise lacks the capacity to deliver effective services to its citizens. The insights are also relevant to non-public organizations, as tradeoffs between interventions by principals and implementations by agents are common in many settings.