The Allocation of Authority in Organizations: A Field Experiment with Bureaucrats*

Oriana Bandiera, Michael Best, Adnan Qadir Khan and Andrea Prat

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2021, vol. 136, issue 4, 2195-2242

Abstract: We design a field experiment to study how the allocation of authority between frontline procurement officers and their monitors affects performance both directly and through the response to incentives. In collaboration with the government of Punjab, Pakistan, we shift authority from monitors to procurement officers and introduce financial incentives in a sample of 600 procurement officers in 26 districts. We find that autonomy alone reduces prices by 9% without reducing quality and that the effect is stronger when the monitor tends to delay approvals for purchases until the end of the fiscal year. In contrast, the effect of performance pay is muted, except when agents face a monitor who does not delay approvals. Time use data reveal agents’ responses vary along the same margin: autonomy increases the time devoted to procurement, and this leads to lower prices only when monitors cause delays. By contrast, incentives work when monitors do not cause delays. The results illustrate that organizational design and anti-corruption policies must balance agency issues at different levels of the hierarchy.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjab029 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The allocation of authority in organizations: a field experiment with bureaucrats (2021)
Working Paper: The Allocation of Authority in Organizations: A Field Experiment with Bureaucrats (2020)
Working Paper: The Allocation of Authority in Organizations: A Field Experiment with Bureaucrats (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:136:y:2021:i:4:p:2195-2242.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().