In this note we offer a critique of the persistent failure of the central North American environmental agency, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, to fully consider the international, comparative, and scientific bases of its policies. We argue that the agency fails not because of...

This essay examines the roles of competition, comparison, imitation, and punishment in the design of bureaucratic performance. Through a series of simulations, this essay examines how these elements - alone and in combination - drive both the performance and technology search paths of adaptive...

In contrast to principal-agency theory, the possibility of the political control of the bureaucracy depends on bureaucratic structure. In this paper, I argue that the functional decentralization of responsibility and authority for policy formulation and implementation involves a net loss of...

The canonical principal-agent problem involves a risk-neutral principal who must use incentives to motivate a risk-averse agent to take a costly, unobservable action that improves the principal's payoff. The standard solution requires an inefficient shifting of risk to the agent. This paper,...

The principal-agent problem is fundamental to organization design. A principal must negotiate an incentive contract to motivate a more risk averse agent to undertake costly actions that cannot be observed. In rational choice theory, the problem is solved through an inefficient shifting of risk...

This essay quantitatively investigates several possible foundations for environmental sustainability, as measured across countries with varying geography, development patterns, social customs, and political arrangements. We first test two central hypotheses about the roles of democratization and...