Suchergebnisse

How governments design institutions for the revelation of information depends on how the costs and benefits are distributed across affected groups. In this study I examine the incidence of different kinds of constituencies and how governments give citizens access to information that affects them. A number of important studies have sought to understand the effect of such rules on the revelation of private information and policy outcomes, but we know little about the sources of those rules. Do the rules coincide with constituencies that benefit from their existence? Are they absent when strong constituencies can avoid bearing the costs of the rules? Using data on community right-to-know protections regarding environmental hazards, I compare the incidence of the benefits and costs of these design choices in the context of rules that reveal information and charge the cost of information revelation to the regulated community. The models show that the incidence of right-to-know protections depends on the presence or absence of constituencies that would enjoy their benefits or bear their costs. However, organizational costs limit the ability of affected constituencies to obtain institutional designs that reflect their interests. Adapted from the source document.

Over the past three decades the economic reasoning embodied in the term 'moral hazard' has entered the lexicon of public health policy. What has been its impact? This commentary sketches three core points where we lack information about the impact of economic reasoning on the current and future direction of health policy.

This study defines and compares three broad theories that seek to explain bureaucratic preferences. I first argue that each of these explanations is complex — that no single measurable attribute encapsulates the entire theory. Second, I argue that these explanations are non-nested — that at least one attribute representing a given theory cannot be expressed as resulting from attributes that represent one of the other theories. Based on the theory of comparisons of non-nested models, I assess these three competing explanations with the Likelihood Dominance Criterion, an approach for assessing the total explanatory power of a given theory relative to that offered by other theories.The comparisons take place in the context of the bureaucratic implementation of policies governing the remediation of hazardous waste at the state level in the United States. The comparisons show that bureaucratic preferences are best explained by the organizational capacity and constraints explanation rather than more proximate political and task environment theories. In total, the agency's rules, capacity, and characteristics form a better total explanation of the observed variance in bureaucratic preferences than either proximate state politics or the agency's task environment.

This study defines and compares three broad theories that seek to explain bureaucratic preferences. I first argue that each of these explanations is complex - that no single measurable attribute encapsulates the entire theory. Second, I argue that these explanations are non-nested - that at least one attribute representing a given theory cannot be expressed as resulting from attributes that represent one of the other theories. Based on the theory of comparisons of non-nested models, I assess these three competing explanations with the Likelihood Dominance Criterion, an approach for assessing the total explanatory power of a given theory relative to that offered by other theories. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2007.]

Governments continue to embrace the market‐like mechanisms of auctions and bidding. This essay considers how governments (as bid‐takers) and firms and nonprofits (as bidders) strategically interact in the design and implementation of these systems. I assess with regard to the uniqueness of bidding in government four principles on the role of: credible commitments, rational collusion, the setting of reserve prices, and heterogeneity among bidders. I also address recent calls for expanding the use of dynamic pricing in government.

This article develops a regime-splitting process model of decentralized policy implementation to integrate two theoretical approaches rooted in the tension between local flexibility and national control. The author estimates a model that simultaneously assesses the ability of each approach to explain the outcome it is meant to map onto (case-level discretion for local flexibility and aggregate responsiveness for national control) as well as each approach's extensibility to the other approach's domain. The data for the study come from the implementation of eight primary statutes by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's regional offices. The results are counterintuitive: the national control approach largely explains case-level discretion, the domain of local flexibility, but retains some power for explaining aggregate responsiveness. The local flexibility perspective contributes to both case-level discretion and aggregate responsiveness. Both models work outside their traditional domains, but neither is a sufficient explanation for decentralized policy implementation.