Browsing by Subject "Delegation"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Decentralized ministerial systems to enhance and sustain education quality : lessons learned from across borders, case studies from Indonesia, Colombia, and South Africa(2011-12) Mobarak Abdelrahman, Nahed Aaed; Treisman, Uri; Wong, PatrickDecentralization is a prominent policy strategy for transferring power from an elite to grassroots actors or from the government to the private or nonprofit sectors. In many developing countries, decentralization has been the policy of choice for improving chronically low performing education systems. This report examines decentralization in three developing countries; Colombia, Indonesia, and South Africa, which are seeking to address their longstanding educational problems. The case studies suggest that effective decentralization depends on creating a clear and measurable vision and a robust strategic plan to achieve it. The studies further revealed the importance of community participation in active school governance, which led to practical solutions to school financial and administrative problems. This research is an attempt to pay attention to problems that could be raised during the journey of policy implementation, as well as to offer guidelines for effective, sustainable change. The discrepancy between policy and practice is a great dilemma, as Cohen said, particularly with the lack of sufficient experience in implementing the new political movements such as decentralization. This report seeks to identify the key components of an effective decentralization plan by tracing the successes and shortcomings of the three case studies. It concludes that a successful education system not only needs a clear vision and effective community participation but also an effective and practical organizational transformation to achieve progress in implementing decentralization. Changes in the educational hierarchy should occur at both the local level and the central level, and should entail more than just a change in the names of positions without changing the tasks themselves.Item Essays on dynamic contracts : allocation of ambiguity and delegation(2016-05) Bhattacharjee, Swagata; STINCHCOMBE, MAXWELL; STAHL, DALE O; BOYARCHENKO, SVETLANA; THOMAS, CAROLINE; ALMAZAN, ANDRESMy dissertation studies the design of contracts in different contexts. It contains two theoretical investigations about contracting under ambiguity: in the context of research partnerships and venture capital financing; and an experimental study to examine delegation of decision rights within organizations. The first chapter studies contract design for innovation under ambiguity. Outsourcing of research is a large and growing trend in knowledge-intensive industries such as the biotechnology and software industries. I model innovation as an ambiguous stochastic process and assume that the commercial firms and research labs differ in their attitude towards ambiguity. I characterize the optimal sequence of short-term contracts and examine how the features of this contract facilitate ambiguity sharing: the dynamic moral hazard problem is mitigated under ambiguity; experimentation stops earlier than is socially optimal; the project may be liquidated even after being granted a patent. I find that redesigning the patent law can not implement the Policymaker’s desired optimum. The second chapter analyzes venture capital investment under ambiguity. A central feature of venture capital financing is the extensive use of control rights as an instrument. In this chapter, I present a model of venture capital financing where investment is allowed to depend on an intermediate ambiguous signal. I show how the presence of ambiguity explains the allocation of control rights if the investor is more ambiguity averse than the entrepreneur. In the third chapter, I discuss how delegation of decision rights can be used as a signal of trust that can be reciprocated by cooperation. First, I theoretically show that in a principal-agent framework, using delegation as a signal is the only Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium that survives forward induction criterion. Then I use experimental methods to test this theoretical prediction. I find that the players do not use delegation very often, thus the forward induction logic is not supported by the observed data. However, once the players are given information about the past sessions, they choose the forward induction equilibrium more often. This suggests that information affects the formation of beliefs and equilibrium selection in Bayesian games.Item Manager identity prominence and managerial performance(2018-06-21) Janardhanan, Niranjan Srinivasan; Bartel, Caroline; Martins, Luis L.; Patil, Shefali; Wiesenfeld, BatiaAlthough prior research has provided rich descriptions of what managers do, it is inconclusive on why some managers are more likely than others to engage in behaviors required for managerial effectiveness, such as making decisions for their teams and engaging with external stakeholders on behalf of their teams. Drawing from identity theory and social identity theory, I propose that manager identity prominence—i.e., the importance attached to the manager identity relative to their other affiliations (e.g. team, department, and profession)—motivates managers to engage more in these managerial behaviors. Since managers have to balance several identities at work, such as that of an organizational member, or an individual contributor on some projects, there is variation in manager identity prominence among managers. Furthermore, given the complex nature of the managerial role, managers often have a choice in the manner in which they engage in managerial behaviors. In this dissertation, I argue that the manager identity prominence relates to managers’ inclusive or restrictive engagement in managerial behaviors depending on their general orientations towards working to for the benefit of others (prosocial motivation), their beliefs about their legitimacy to dominate over others (social dominance orientation), and the breadth of strategic choices available to them at work (managerial discretion). To demonstrate these relationships, I introduce the construct of manager identity prominence and develop and validate an item-based measure for the construct. Using two studies—a quasi-field study on a panel of managers employed in the United States, and a field study at a large organization in Southern United States—I examine how individual and contextual factors modify the relationships between manager identity prominence and managerial behaviors. Results from two studies support the hypothesis that manager identity prominence relates positively to restriction of subordinates’ input on team processes when managers are high on social dominance orientation. Results from the multi-source field study also indicates that in contexts of higher managerial discretion, manager identity prominence relates negatively to decision delegation and positively to restriction of input from subordinates.