To a very large extent, politics is agency. Indeed, agent-principal relationships pervade public and public-private behavior. This paper reviews the extensive but not yet integrated literature applying agency concepts to political settings. This includes agency in definitions of politics or...

This was the first article explicitly on the theory of agency published in a regular, i.e., nonproceedings, issue of a journal in social science.The paper presents a fiduciary function model of policing in agency, with an application to attempts to influence regulatory performance by policing...

Activists around the world seek to expose a global system that fails to tax multinationals adequately and thus deprives governments of needed revenues, with profound effects for development in the world's poorest nations. These tax activists have sparked a global movement, with groups all over...

In our political-agency setting, voters are uninformed about two traits of an incumbent politician: ability and bias. Voters observe the implemented policy and learn the state immediately before the election. We show that when the bias of biased politicians is strong such that voters prefer...

This paper presented the core part of the then newly-developed theory of agency, which had been independently proposed by Stephen Ross and Barry Mitnick. The paper described a typology of agency relationships based on the nature of the consent between agent and principal, the source of...

I show that it is optimal to separate non-benevolent regulators when regulated projects are large. Separation prevents regulators from coordinating to appropriate all of the agent's informational rent when they know the type of the latter; therefore, there is a trade-off between saving on...

This work develops an abstract, theory-founded understanding of organization-internal infor­mation security. For this purpose, established knowledge from the field of information security is restructured on the basis of two different dimensions: The historical dimension distinguishes three...

Agencies possess enormous regulatory discretion. This discretion allows executive branch agencies in particular to insulate their decisions from presidential review by raising the costs of such review. They can do so, for example, through variations in policymaking form, cost-benefit analysis...

A group of journalists recently revealed “LuxLeaks”: a set of documents showing that Luxembourg’s tax authority has been systemically delivering secret deals to multinationals. In this column, I explain why LuxLeaks has revealed a feature, not a bug, in the international tax system....