Senior government executives make many decisions, and not-infrequently these are difficult. By “difficult” decisions, the literature generally means ones characterized by complicated and uncertain information, and hard tradeoffs among conflicting value objectives. In a range of interviews...

The literature on the use of performance measurement in government has focused much attention on hypothesized unintended dysfunctional consequences that such measurement may produce. We conceptualize these dysfunctional consequences as involving either effort substitution (reducing effort on...