Challenge funds (CF) induce competition between grant applicants as they develop proposals to address important social problems. We develop a game theoretic model to study how funding availability and proof of concept requirements (e.g., pilots or other forms of early stage screening) influence...

In a model of project design, evaluation, and selection, we explore how the incentives to improve the design of projects depend on the availability of funding and the process of evaluation. We show that project designers (researchers or NGOs) prefer to subject their projects to less-rigorous...

In a model of project design, evaluation, and selection, we explore how the incentives to improve the design of projects depend on the availability of funding and the process of evaluation. We show that project designers (researchers or NGOs) prefer to subject their projects to less-rigorous...

When organizations have limited accountability, antifraud measures, including auditing, often face barriers due to institutional resistance and practical difficulties on the ground. This is especially true in development aid, where aid organizations face incentives to suppress information about...

One conjecture in the theory of incentives is that incentives based on broader outcomes may be better at motivating agents than incentives based on narrow measures. We designed an experiment to test these hypotheses using a ""prospective randomized evaluation procedure"" (PREP). We then apply...

The returns from public investment, especially during periods of scaling up, are often lower than expected. To understand the mechanisms behind this regularity we exploit original information on investment projects obtained from World Bank project reports to document the extent and the drivers...

As the objective of the capital budgeting is to add values to the wealth of an owner of a business, the capital budgeting primarily insists the recovery of investments made in the projects. To improve the owner’s wealth, it is important to evaluate and identify profitable projects using some...

Do quality at entry assessments enhance the delivery of development projects? In this paper we take advantage of approval and execution systems in place at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to examine whether projects that have higher quality at entry-captured through grading scores...

The implementation of public projects by organizations requires professionalization of their evaluation methods. The research objective is to identify the key criteria for project evaluation that go beyond the "project triangle." The following problem was formulated: whether ex post evaluation...

The problem of assessing the social efficiency of the project complexes of the region is to develop the necessary methods for evaluating both individual social projects and their portfolios considered within the region. Taking into account that the social effect of any project can be measured in...