Agencies Running from Agency Discretion

From funding agencies to scientific agency

P ublicly funded research involves the distribution of a considerable amount of money. Funding agencies such as the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the European Research Council (ERC) give billions of dollars or euros of taxpayers’ money to individual researchers, research teams, universities, and research institutes each year. Taxpayers acco...

Trust and Discretion in Agency Contracts

We extend the standard agency framework to allow for complex information, trustworthiness of the principal, and incomplete contracts and show that contractual incompleteness arises endogenously when there is enough complexity and trust. Several predictions of the standard model break down in our more general construction: trust plays a crucial role in the design of optimal contracts; not all th...

Regulatory Agencies – the Challenges of Balancing Agency

Running Head: DARK SIDE OF DISCRETION THE DARK SIDE OF DISCRETION Leader Personality and Organizational Decline

Collective allocation of science funding: from funding agencies to scientific agency

Public agencies like the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) award tens of billions of dollars in annual science funding. How can this money be distributed as efficiently as possible to best promote scientific innovation and productivity? The present system relies primarily on peer review of project proposals. In 2010 alone, NSF convened more than ...