Suchergebnisse

One of the defining features of Turkish politics has been the strong influence of the military in civilian politics. However, since the early 2000s, we have seen unprecedented developments, substantially constraining the political powers of the military. How can we interpret this period from a historical perspective? What are the continuities and discontinuities in Turkish civil-military relations? Do these developments mark the end of military guardianship in the country? Employing the principal-agent framework, this study shows that the path of Turkish civil-military relations has been cyclical, where the status of the military has swung between agent and principal. Such swings have led to a significant degree of variance in the nature of the military guardianship. Thus, this study identifies two distinct stages of military tutelage during the Republican period: symbolic (1924-1960) and overt/assertive (1960-2001). It is further argued that the recent reversion of the military back to agent of the civilian principals has initiated a post-guardianship era in Turkey. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society/Sage Publications Inc.]

One of the new avenues in the study of political corruption is that of neo-institutional economics, of which the principal-agent theory is a part. In this article a principal-agent model of corruption is presented, in which there are two principals (one of which is corrupting), and one agent (who is corrupted). The behaviour of these principals and agent is analysed in terms of the costs and benefits associated with different actions. The model is applied to political corruption in representative democracies, showing that, contrary to common belief, the use of principal-agent models is not limited to bureaucratic corruption.

One of the defining features of Turkish politics has been the strong influence of the military in civilian politics. However, since the early 2000s, we have seen unprecedented developments, substantially constraining the political powers of the military. How can we interpret this period from a historical perspective? What are the continuities and discontinuities in Turkish civil–military relations? Do these developments mark the end of military guardianship in the country? Employing the principal–agent framework, this study shows that the path of Turkish civil–military relations has been cyclical, where the status of the military has swung between agent and principal. Such swings have led to a significant degree of variance in the nature of the military guardianship. Thus, this study identifies two distinct stages of military tutelage during the Republican period: symbolic (1924–1960) and overt/ assertive (1960–2001). It is further argued that the recent reversion of the military back to agent of the civilian principals has initiated a post-guardianship era in Turkey.

This article explores the utility of using principal-agent analysis-both at the level of the Commission and the European Union (EU) as a whole-to explain EU decision making in the negotiations between the European Union and South Africa that led to the Trade, Development and Co-operation Agreement of 1999. The article argues that the internal Commission negotiations, which are often overlooked in analyses of EU trade negotiations, need to be analyzed. It demonstrates that both the initial EU agenda and the final agreement with South Africa were heavily influenced by those Directorates-General (DGs) most affected by these policy decisions. Moreover, the EU negotiators, who had developmental interests because of their location within DG Development, were particularly influential. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThis paper studies how incentives are affected by intention-based reciprocity preferences when the principal hires many agents. Our results describe the set of agents' sensitivities to reciprocity required to sustain a given strategy profile. We also show that hiring reciprocal agents to implement a first- or a second-best contract will always benefit the principal if the strategy profile is symmetric. Instead, when the profile (first or second best) is asymmetric the principal's interest might be better served by self-interested agents. We conclude the paper by clarifying when symmetric profiles are most likely to arise.

The principal-agent framework is a rapidly developing approach to the analysis of contractual relationships within the private sector. We argue that it should be a promising approach to the analysis of public policy commitments as well. As a matter of fact, it allows the statement of a number of basic public policy problems in terms of an integrated framework. The making and implementation of public policy involve fundamental contractual problems referred to as asymmetric information, moral hazard, bounded rationality and adverse selection. The Niskanen bureau model is a principal-agent model, but its general result is much more limited than previously recognized, which may be shown by employing the same mathematical structure as Niskanen himself uses.

We consider the problem of when to deliver the contract payoff, in a continuous-time principal-agent setting, in which the agent's effort is unobservable. The principal can design contracts of a simple form that induce the agent to ask for the payoff at the time of the principal's choosing. The optimal time of payment depends on the agent's and the principal's outside options. We develop a theory for general utility functions, while with CARA utilities we are able to specify conditions under which the optimal payment time is not random. However, in general, the optimal payment time is typically random. One illustrative application is the case when the agent can be fired, after having been paid a severance payment, and then replaced by another agent. The methodology we use is the stochastic maximum principle and its link to Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equations.

The point of the article is studying basic problems of the firm institutional theory - opportunism behavior problem in a principal-agent relationship system on the firm level. The article is devoted to the analysis of the essence of opportunism as economic category, definition of basic forms of inside opportunism and estimation of their influence on performance of firms of the Ural region. Factors that influence the level of opportunism are classified.

This conference paper analyses the European Patent Organization from the perspective of scholarship on delegation to IOs and principal-agent theory. The paper argues that the EPOrg is a so-called complex agent, with delegation taking place from a multitude of principals (the contracting states) to an agent in a wider sense (the EPOrg), followed by further delegation within the IO, by the representatives of the contracting states (AC), to the agent in a narrow sense (EPOff). To complicate things further, these representatives come from National Patent Offices, which are (a) domestic agents in national patent granting procedures vis-à-vis their domestic principals, and (b) operate in the multi-level European patent system as co-agents with the EPOff. This set-up will become even more labyrinthine with the introduction of the Unitary Patent (and the Unified Patent Court) within the European Union, the implementation of which will be put in the hands of the EPOff. The paper argues that the system suffers from multiple agency issues, which have resulted in too much autonomy for the ultimate agent (EPOff), and an overall lack of political guidance. ; Work in progress, please do not cite without permission.