Suchergebnisse

AbstractPreventing climate change and damage from natural disasters typically requires policies with up‐front costs that promise a flow of benefits over time. Why has obtaining such policies in a competitive electoral democracy proved so intractable? We develop a formal model of electoral accountability in this context, in which politicians have private information about their motivations. The model shows why fully rational voters, though certain that incumbents spend less on disaster prevention than is good for them, reelect incumbents at very high rates. In addition, in such equilibria, voters would punish incumbents who spent more on disaster prevention. This equilibrium is consistent with (and implies) some of the major empirical regularities observed in the literature on voting and disaster prevention. We discuss some implications of our analysis for advancing public debates about disaster and climate change mitigation.

We generalize standard delegation models to consider policymaking when both information and authority are dispersed among multiple actors. In our theory, the principal may delegate partial authority to a privately informed agent while also reserving some authority for the principal's use after observing the agent's decision. Counterintuitively, the equilibrium amount of authority delegated to the agent is increasing in the preference divergence between the principal and agent. We also show that the amount of authority delegated depends upon whether the agent can observe the principal's own private information (a condition we refer to as "top-down transparency"): this form of transparency increases the authority that must be delegated to the agent to obtain truthful policymaking. Accordingly, such transparency can result in less-informed policymaking. Nonetheless, the principal will sometimes but not always voluntarily choose such transparency.

AbstractWe develop a model of "notice and comment" rulemaking, focussing on strategic issues facing agencies and interest groups in light of judicial review in this process. Specifically, we analyse the incentives for agencies and groups to produce and reveal information during rulemaking. We show that judicial review can produce informed policymaking, but that participatory rulemaking can bias agency policymaking in favour of groups with access to the rule-making process. In addition, the model allows an analysis of doctrines of judicial review of agency policymaking. The model reveals that "politicised" judicial review can be beneficial because of its effects on agency incentives for information acquisition in policymaking. Accordingly, socially optimal judicial review may be "legally irrational" and, contrary to standard doctrines of judicial review in the United States, judicial deference to rules with thin records can be optimal.

We present a model of two‐candidate elections in which candidates are office‐motivated, campaigning is voluntary and costly, and one candidate has a valence advantage. In equilibrium, the order of campaign announcements matters: Each candidate would prefer to announce his or her position after the other candidate has announced his or hers. The fundamental predictions of the model are (1) the impact of valence and campaigning costs on candidates' equilibrium behaviors is in general ambiguous, requiring further specification of the details of the electoral situation, and (2) in general, equilibrium platform announcements are essentially independent of the location of the median voter's ideal point. In addition, the model is consistent with elections in which both, only one, or neither candidate actively campaigns, and, finally, even when one candidate has a large valence advantage, there might be no equilibrium in which he or she will win the election with certainty.

In hierarchical organizations lower-level agents can often censor the information that a higher-level principal has available to make a decision. We present a model of this interaction in which the principal can also access an independent source of unfiltered but lower-quality information besides that provided by the agent. This provision of outside information can be thought of as 'stovepiping,' the transmission of unfiltered information from analysts directly to decision-makers. Stovepiping can, in equilibrium, result in the agent passing along more information to the principal, precisely because the outsider's information is of lower quality than the agent's. But it can also lead the agent to 'destroy' information so that there is no basis for any policy change. Accordingly, stovepiping has countervailing effects on the principal's utility. We discuss the comparative statics of equilibrium levels of information transmission with respect to the preferences of the principal, the outsider, and the probability that the outsider has access to the information held by the agent.

In hierarchical organizations lower-level agents can often censor the information that a higher-level principal has available to make a decision. We present a model of this interaction in which the principal can also access an independent source of unfiltered but lower-quality information besides that provided by the agent. This provision of outside information can be thought of as 'stovepiping,' the transmission of unfiltered information from analysts directly to decision-makers. Stovepiping can, in equilibrium, result in the agent passing along more information to the principal, precisely because the outsider's information is of lower quality than the agent's. But it can also lead the agent to 'destroy' information so that there is no basis for any policy change. Accordingly, stovepiping has countervailing effects on the principal's utility. We discuss the comparative statics of equilibrium levels of information transmission with respect to the preferences of the principal, the outsider, and the probability that the outsider has access to the information held by the agent. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]