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"International Hierarchy" published on by Oxford University Press.

Most people take the conditions they work and live in as a given, believing it to be normal that societies are stratified and that organisations are hierarchical. Many even think that this is the way it should be - and are neither willing nor able to think that it could be otherwise. This book raises the awareness of hierarchy, its complexity and longevity. It focuses on a single but fundamental problem of social systems such as dyads, groups, organisations and whole societies: Why and how does hierarchical social order persist over time? In order to investigate the question, author

AbstractScholars have written extensively about hierarchical international order, on the one hand, and war on the other, but surprisingly little work systematically explores the connection between the two. This disconnect is all the more striking given that empirical studies have found a strong relationship between the two. We provide a generative computational network model that explains hierarchy and war as two elements of a larger recursive process: The threat of war drives the formation of hierarchy, which in turn shapes states' incentives for war. Grounded in canonical theories of hierarchy and war, the model explains an array of known regularities about hierarchical order and conflict. Surprisingly, we also find that many traditional results of the international relations literature—including institutional persistence, balancing behavior, and systemic self‐regulation—emerge from the interplay between hierarchy and war.

"The Judicial Hierarchy" published on by Oxford University Press.

The 'efficient cabinet' of the 18th cent is the body from which the modern cabinet has developed & it is from a similar process that the office of Prime Minister has emerged. Although there was no hierarchy in the sense of authority coming down through clear chains of command, there did exist a hierarchy insofar as; (1) some ministers (MIN's) were always, some were sometimes, & others were never in the Cabinet, (2) the MIN's' posts could be arranged in order of precedence, importance, & lucrativeness, (3) some MIN's were more important than others, in a specific area of responsibility, (4) some MIN's were largely subordinate to others, (5) most MIN's owed their positions, in some part, to the influence of others in the Cabinet or ministry. & (6) a pol'al career consisted in promotion from one office to another. In the 19th & 20th cent's, the attempt has been made to draw up the list according to the 'principle of evolving precedence'; since the middle of the 19th cent there has seemed to be some doubt as to the precedence to be accorded to the newer offices, & some of the older ones also. Today place seems to be fixed by either formal precedence, the importance of the office, or the abilities of the officeholder, & a ministry contains continuous gradations of rank, both within & between the various orders of the hierarchy. IPSA.

What determines the distribution of information acquired within the hierarchy of a public organization? Without market processes, the generation and absorption of information in bureaucracy relies on individual actors undertaking costly action to acquire it. This paper reports on comparisons between individual-level claims by public officials in the Government of Ethiopia regarding the characteristics of local constituents they serve and objective benchmark data. Public officials make large errors about their constituents' characteristics. The errors of 49 percent of public officials are at least 50 percent of the underlying benchmark data. Given public officials' stated reliance on this information to make public policy decisions, such mistakes imply a substantial misallocation of public resources. The results are consistent with classic theoretical predictions related to the incentives that determine information acquisition in hierarchies, such as de facto control over decision making and an organizational culture of valuing operational information. A field experiment implies that these incentives mediate the effectiveness of interventions aimed at improving the information of public-sector agents.