The Politics of (No) Compromise: Information Acquisition, Policy Discretion, and Reputation

Liqun Liu

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Precise information is essential for making good policies, especially those regarding reform decisions. However, decision-makers may hesitate to gather such information if certain decisions could have negative impacts on their future careers. We model how decision-makers with career concerns may acquire policy-relevant information and carry out reform decisions when their policy discretion can be limited ex ante. Typically, decision-makers with career concerns have weaker incentives to acquire information compared to decision-makers without such concerns. In this context, we demonstrate that the public can encourage information acquisition by eliminating either the "moderate policy" or the status quo from decision-makers' discretion. We also analyze when reform decisions should be strategically delegated to decision-makers with or without career concerns.

Date: 2021-10, Revised 2023-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.00522 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:arx:papers:2111.00522

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().