Walking and other forms of physical activity have many health benefits, but people often fail to follow through on their own goals of being more active. To address gaps in current understanding of how to design technologysupported physical activity interventions, we conducted a randomized field experiment of a commitment device: making public announcements. In a control condition, weekly commit...

To what extent and in what ways does the global information technology revolution affect the openness and accountability of public organizations? Adopting a model of the effects of global pressure on public bureaucracy (Welch and Wong 1998) as the theoretical framework, this study combines two streams of research and sources of data—the Cyberspace Policy Research Group's (CyPRG) comparative ana...

This paper investigates how informative media affect political accountability and policy. I first present a baseline model of how informative media affects political accountability. The model is used to discuss the welfare consequences of private provision of news. It shows how media regulation and public broadcasting may correct market failures, notably, the under-provision of news. The model ...

The current paper addresses the complex issue of accountability by focusing on Italian public hospitals and teaching hospitals; it aims to analyze Italian health care organizations' strategies for responding to the pressure generated by regulations. In particular, in the last few years, Italian hospitals and teaching hospitals have been obliged to implement or improve their accountability instr...

The supposed rise of the regulatory state (Majone 1997), often associated with the international privatisation policies and ‘within government’ change (Hood et al. 1999), has led to a renewed emphasis on debates concerning accountability and transparency. Accountability and transparency have also become prominent features in the talk about ‘governance’, as promoted by diverse groups and organis...

This paper should be seen in the broad research field that analyses the impact of ICTs on public accountability reports with the objective of understanding whether the institutional websites of public administrations are qualifying and privileged carriers for social reporting and which models they use to draw up their documents. Our analysis refers to the public entities of the Italian regional...

Both the medical care and public health systems have invested considerable resources to define, measure, and improve quality and health outcomes. A movement toward accountability has generated performance indicators from the medical arena and "leading health indicators" from the public health arena. The focus on specific conditions by the medical care system has been at odds with public health'...

This paper starts with a theoretical discussion on the relationship between performance and accountability in public organizations with a special focus on administrative reforms. Accountability theory is discussed and related to different aspects of performance. How ambiguous is the relationship between accountability and performance? Do different types of accountability relate to different asp...