Information, Acquisition, Political Game and the Delegation Authority

Jean-Jacques Laffont and Wilfried Sand-Zantman

Working Papers from Toulouse - GREMAQ

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the problem of decentralizing public good decision-making from a political and informational perspective. First, we explain why different levels of jurisdiction, central decision-maker and local ones, are likely to take their decisions under different informational structures by deriving the incentives of both potential decision-makers to look for the relevant pieces of information. By endogenizing the informational structures, we identify a trade-off in the choice between centralization and decentralization. It amounts to choosing between a costly information technology allowing to take optimal decisions and a free information technology subject to several distortionary influences.

Keywords: CONTRACTS; GOVERNMENT; DECENTRALIZATION; ELECTIONS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H10 L14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998

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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fth:gremaq:98.510

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