Download or read book Information Incentives and Commitment written by Lixin Colin Xu and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Information Incentives and Commitment An Empirical Analysis of Contracts Between Government and State Enterprises written by Lixin Xu and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: May 1997 Written performance contracts, widely touted as a way to help state-owned enterprises improve performance, seem to fail. Why? Because information asymmetry, lack of government commitment, and lack of managerial commitment lead to weak incentives and shirking. Shirley and Xu analyze experience with written performance contracts between developing country governments and the managers of their state-owned enterprises. Such contracts have been a vogue since the mid-1980s, and substantial resources have been sunk into their design and enforcement, yet the few assessments to date show mixed results. Using a simple agency model, they identify how problems of weak incentives stemming from information asymmetry, lack of government commitment, and lack of managerial commitment can lead to shirking. They apply the model to a sample of 12 contracts with monopoly enterprises in six developing countries (Ghana, India, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, and Senegal). All suffer from serious contracting problems. They find no pattern of improved performance that can be attributed to the contracts. Only three of the 12 case-study companies showed a turnaround in total factor productivity after contracts were introduced, six continued past trends, and three performed substantially worse under contracts than they had before. Labor productivity improved at a faster pace in four cases, and deteriorated in none, but the improvement predated the contract. Performance contracting assumes that government's objectives can be maximized, and performance improved, by setting targets that take into account the constraints placed on managers. For this to occur, the principals must be willing to explicitly state their objectives, assign to them priorities and weights, translate them into performance improvement targets, provide incentives to meet those targets (or monitor the agents without incurring significant costs), and credibly signal their commitment to the contract. These conditions failed to materialize. Why would governments adopt contracts to which they were not committed or that were politically unrealistic? Sometimes because it enabled them to get foreign assistance. How explain the managers' lack of commitment? Not surprisingly, managers with information advantages and bargaining power, and with no strong incentives or commitment from the government, used their advantages to manipulate the targets so as to ensure that their performance would be judged satisfactory. Shirley and Xu outline the conditions under which performance contracts might succeed in improving performance. This paper - a product of the Finance and Private Sector Development Division, Policy Research Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to analyze the role of institutions and incentives in public sector management, as well as in the private sector. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project The Changing Role of the State (RPO 678-69).

Download or read book Incentives and Commitment in an Organization of Professionals and a Social Movement Organization of Professionals written by Harold L. Cook and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Incentives and Test Based Accountability in Education written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years there have been increasing efforts to use accountability systems based on large-scale tests of students as a mechanism for improving student achievement. The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a prominent example of such an effort, but it is only the continuation of a steady trend toward greater test-based accountability in education that has been going on for decades. Over time, such accountability systems included ever-stronger incentives to motivate school administrators, teachers, and students to perform better. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education reviews and synthesizes relevant research from economics, psychology, education, and related fields about how incentives work in educational accountability systems. The book helps identify circumstances in which test-based incentives may have a positive or a negative impact on student learning and offers recommendations for how to improve current test-based accountability policies. The most important directions for further research are also highlighted. For the first time, research and theory on incentives from the fields of economics, psychology, and educational measurement have all been pulled together and synthesized. Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education will inform people about the motivation of educators and students and inform policy discussions about NCLB and state accountability systems. Education researchers, K-12 school administrators and teachers, as well as graduate students studying education policy and educational measurement will use this book to learn more about the motivation of educators and students. Education policy makers at all levels of government will rely on this book to inform policy discussions about NCLB and state accountability systems.

Download or read book Leadership Style and Incentives written by Julio Rotemberg and published by Sagwan Press. This book was released on 2018-02-07 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Download or read book Price Caps and Incentive Regulation in Telecommunications written by Michael A. Einhorn and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael A. Einhorn In continuing to deregulate telecommunications companies, regulators have begun to consider alternative approaches to traditional cost-based price regulation as a means of encouraging monopoly efficiency, promulgating technological innova tion, protecting consumers, and reducing administrative costs. Under cost-based regulatory procedures that had been used, prices were designed to recover the regulated company's costs plus an allowed rate of return on its rate base; this strategy was costly to administer, provided no consistent incentives to cost-ef ficiency and technological improvement, afforded many opportunities for strategic misrepresentation of reported costs, and may have encouraged both uneconomic expansion of the utility's rate base and cross-subsidization of its competitive services. A category of alternative regulatory approaches can be classified broadly as social contracts. Under the general strategy of social contract regulation, regulators first delimit a group of regulated core services that they continue to regulate and then stipulate a list of constraints that the utility must agree to meet in the future; in exchange, regulators agree to detariff or deregulate entirely other competitive or nonessential services that the utility may offer. As long as no stipulated constraints are violated, the utility may price freely any service; if it reduces costs, it may keep a share of its profits. According to the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA, 1987), social contract agreements of one form or another have been considered or implemented in a majority of American states.

Download or read book Information Incentives and Bargaining in the Japanese Economy written by Masahiko Aoki and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth analysis of conventional notions for basic characteristics of the Japanese market economy's microstructure that have significantly influenced economists' approaches to industrial organization.

Download or read book Information Sharing and Incentives in Organizations written by Jean-Etienne de Bettignies and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We study an organization, consisting of a manager and a worker, whose success depends on its ability to estimate a payoff-relevant but unknown parameter. If the manager has private information about this parameter, she has an incentive to conceal it from the worker in order to motivate him to search for additional information. If she could commit to an information-sharing policy, the manager would share her information more than under no commitment, though less than would be efficient. Further results on the effects of managerial ability, and on the interaction between managerial and worker abilities, are also derived.

Download or read book A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation written by Jean-Jacques Laffont and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on their work in the application of principal-agent theory to questions of regulation, Laffont and Tirole develop a synthetic approach to this field, focusing on the regulation of natural monopolies such as military contractors, utility companies and transportation authorities.

Download or read book The Theory of Incentives written by Jean-Jacques Laffont and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-27 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economics has much to do with incentives--not least, incentives to work hard, to produce quality products, to study, to invest, and to save. Although Adam Smith amply confirmed this more than two hundred years ago in his analysis of sharecropping contracts, only in recent decades has a theory begun to emerge to place the topic at the heart of economic thinking. In this book, Jean-Jacques Laffont and David Martimort present the most thorough yet accessible introduction to incentives theory to date. Central to this theory is a simple question as pivotal to modern-day management as it is to economics research: What makes people act in a particular way in an economic or business situation? In seeking an answer, the authors provide the methodological tools to design institutions that can ensure good incentives for economic agents. This book focuses on the principal-agent model, the "simple" situation where a principal, or company, delegates a task to a single agent through a contract--the essence of management and contract theory. How does the owner or manager of a firm align the objectives of its various members to maximize profits? Following a brief historical overview showing how the problem of incentives has come to the fore in the past two centuries, the authors devote the bulk of their work to exploring principal-agent models and various extensions thereof in light of three types of information problems: adverse selection, moral hazard, and non-verifiability. Offering an unprecedented look at a subject vital to industrial organization, labor economics, and behavioral economics, this book is set to become the definitive resource for students, researchers, and others who might find themselves pondering what contracts, and the incentives they embody, are really all about.

Download or read book The Handbook of Behavior Change written by Martin S. Hagger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social problems in many domains, including health, education, social relationships, and the workplace, have their origins in human behavior. The documented links between behavior and social problems have compelled governments and organizations to prioritize and mobilize efforts to develop effective, evidence-based means to promote adaptive behavior change. In recognition of this impetus, The Handbook of Behavior Change provides comprehensive coverage of contemporary theory, research, and practice on behavior change. It summarizes current evidence-based approaches to behavior change in chapters authored by leading theorists, researchers, and practitioners from multiple disciplines, including psychology, sociology, behavioral science, economics, philosophy, and implementation science. It is the go-to resource for researchers, students, practitioners, and policy makers looking for current knowledge on behavior change and guidance on how to develop effective interventions to change behavior.

Download or read book Incentives written by Donald E. Campbell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-01 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 2006, examines the incentives at work in a wide range of institutions to see how and how well coordination is achieved by informing and motivating individual decision makers. The book examines the performance of agents hired to carry out specific tasks, from taxi drivers to CEOs. It investigates the performance of institutions, from voting schemes to kidney transplants, to see if they enhance general well being. The book examines a broad range of market transactions, from auctions to labor markets, to the entire economy. The analysis is conducted using specific worked examples, lucid general theory, and illustrations drawn from news stories. Of the seventy different topics and sections, only twelve require a knowledge of calculus. The second edition offers new chapters on auctions, matching and assignment problems, and corporate governance. Boxed examples are used to highlight points of theory and are separated from the main text.

Download or read book Information Incentives and Education Policy written by Derek A. Neal and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-14 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we ensure that waste and inefficiency do not undermine the mission of publicly funded schools? Derek Neal writes that economists must analyze education policy in the same way they analyze other procurement problems. Insights from research on incentives and contracts in the private sector point to new approaches that could induce publicly funded educators to provide excellent education, even though taxpayers and parents cannot monitor what happens in the classroom. Information, Incentives, and Education Policy introduces readers to what economists know—and do not know—about the logjams created by misinformation and disincentives in education. Examining a range of policy agendas, from assessment-based accountability and centralized school assignments to charter schools and voucher systems, Neal demonstrates where these programs have been successful, where they have failed, and why. The details clearly matter: there is no quick-and-easy fix for education policy. By combining elements from various approaches, economists can help policy makers design optimal reforms. Information, Incentives, and Education Policy is organized to show readers how standard tools from economics research on information and incentives speak directly to some of the most crucial issues in education today. In addition to providing an overview of the pluses and minuses of particular programs, each chapter includes a series of exercises that allow students of economics to work through the mathematics for themselves or with an instructor’s assistance. For those who wish to master the models and tools that economists of education should use in their work, there is no better resource available.

Download or read book Hospital Governance and Incentive Design written by Florence Eid and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2001 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representation of community and government interests on hospital boards can balance the competing concerns of reducing costs and increasing the quality of service provision in corporatized hospitals.

Download or read book Essays on Information and Incentives written by Juan Pablo Xandri Antuña and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis studies problems of belief and information formation of agents, and its effect on incentive provision in problems of experimental and mechanism design. Chapter 1 is based on joint work with Arun Chandrasekhar and Horacio Larreguy. In this chapter we present the results of an experiment we conducted in rural Karnataka, India, to get evidence on how agents learn from each other's actions in the context of a social network. Theory has mostly focused on two leading models of social learning on networks: Bayesian updating and local averaging (DeGroot rules of thumb) which can yield greatly divergent behavior; individuals employing local averaging rules of thumb often double-count information and, in our context, may not exhibit convergent behavior in the long run. We study experiments in which seven individuals are placed into a network, each with full knowledge of its structure. The participants attempt to learn the underlying (binary) state of the world. Individuals receive independent, identically distributed signals about the state in the first period only; thereafter, individuals make guesses about the underlying state of the world and these guesses are transmitted to their neighbors at the beginning of the following round. We consider various environments including incomplete information Bayesian models and provide evidence that individuals are best described by DeGroot models wherein they either take simple majority of opinions in their neighborhood Chapter 2 is based on joint work with Arun Chandrasekhar, and studies how researchers should design payment schemes when making experiments on repeated games, such as the game studied in Chapter 1. It is common for researchers studying repeated and dynamic games in a lab experiment to pay participants for all rounds or a randomly chosen round. We argue that these payment schemes typically implement different set of subgame perfect equilibria (SPE) outcomes than the target game. Specifically, paying a participant for a randomly chosen round (or for all rounds with even small amounts of curvature) makes the game such that early rounds matter more to the agent, by lowering discounted future payments. In addition, we characterize the mechanics of the problems induced by these payment methods. We are able to measure the extent and shape of the distortions. We also establish that a simple payment scheme, paying participants for the last (randomly occurring) round, implements the game. The result holds for any dynamic game with time separable utility and discounting. A partial converse holds: any payment scheme implementing the SPE should generically be history and time independent and only depend on the contemporaneous decision. Chapter 3 studies a different but related problem, in which agents now have imperfect information not about some state of nature, but rather about the behavior of other players, and how this affects policy making when the planner does not know what agents expects her to do. Specifically, I study the problem of a government with low credibility, who decides to make a reform to remove ex-post time inconsistent incentives due to lack of commitment. The government has to take a policy action, but has the ability to commit to limiting its discretionary power. If the public believed the reform solved this time inconsistency problem, the policy maker could achieve complete discretion. However, if the public does not believe the reform to be successful some discretion must be sacrificed in order to induce public trust. With repeated interactions, the policy maker can build reputation about her reformed incentives. However, equilibrium reputation dynamics are extremely sensitive to assumptions about the publics beliefs, particularly after unexpected events. To overcome this limitation, I study the optimal robust policy that implements public trust for all beliefs that are consistent with common knowledge of rationality. I focus on robustness to all extensive-form rationalizable beliefs and provide a characterization. I show that the robust policy exhibits both partial and permanent reputation building along its path, as well as endogenous transitory reputation losses. In addition, I demonstrate that almost surely the policy maker eventually convinces the public she does not face a time consistency problem and she is able to do this with an exponential arrival rate. This implies that as we consider more patient policy makers, the payoff of robust policies converge to the complete information benchmark. I finally explore how further restrictions on beliefs alter optimal policy and accelerate reputation building.

Download or read book Real Incentive Effects of Soft Information written by Peter O. Christensen and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both soft, non-contractible, and hard, contractible, information are informative about managerial ability and future firm performance. If a manager's future compensation depends on expectations of ability or future performance, then the manager has implicit incentives to affect the information. We examine the real incentive effects of soft information in a dynamic agency with limited commitment. When long-term contracts are renegotiated, the rewards for future performance inherent in long-term contracts allow the principal partial control over the implicit incentives. This is because the soft information affects the basis for contract renegotiation. With short-term contracts, the principal has no control over the basis for contract negotiation, thus long-term contracts generally dominate short-term contracts. With long-term contracts, the principal's control over implicit incentives is characterized in terms of effective contracting on an implicit aggregation of the soft information that arises from predicting (forming expectations of) future performance. We provide sufficient conditions for soft information to have no real incentive effects. In general, implicit incentives not controllable by the principal include fixed effects, such as career concerns driven by labour markets external to the agency. When controllable incentives span the fixed effects of career concerns, the latter have no real effects with regard to total managerial incentives -- they would optimally be the same with or without career concerns. Our analysis suggests empirical tests for estimating career concerns that should explicitly incorporate non-contractible information.

Download or read book The Influence of Monetary Incentives on Goal Choice Goal Commitment and Task Performance written by James A. Riedel and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this study was to determine the mechanism by which monetary incentives influence goal choice, goal commitment, and task performance. It was hypothesized that monetary incentives influence cognitions that determine these events. One hundred and thirty subjects recruited for a work simulation study were assigned randomly to groups that differed in terms of the magnitude of incentive offered for various levels of performance. Overall the results suggest that the effects of monetary incentives on goals and performance may be explained, in part, by their influence on the process of goal choice. Goal choice and commitment were positively related to performance. Also, goals mediated the effects of incentives on performance. A research model is proposed for use in predicting performance. Keywords: Goal setting, Motivation, Expectancy theory.