Street-level bureaucrats shape policy through using discretion in their interactions with citizens and service users delivering public services. Discretion allows street-level to bridge between the complex, individual, human situations they encounter. Drawing on insights from feminist institutionalism, this article establishes gender as a relevant analytical category understanding discretion. W...

This paper revisits the classic discretion versus commitment debate when a policymaker issues signals and agents choose to ignore them or not. Besides responding with discretion to agents’ actions or committing to a plan ex ante, a policymaker can also choose an adaptation policy, where she commits after agents make learning decisions but before agents take actions. Two mechanisms are at work i...

We experimentally investigate a repeated “inspection game” where, in the stage game, an employee can either work or shirk and an employer simultaneously chooses to inspect or not inspect. The unique equilibrium of the stage game is in mixed strategies with positive probabilities of shirking/inspecting while combined payoffs are maximized when the employee works and the employer does not inspect...

It has long been recognised that discretion is vital to good police work. However, in Britain (and many other countries), practices of discretion in the stop and search context have come under much scrutiny as it has widely been linked to racist practices, i.e. a disproportionate amount of Black and minority ethnic individuals are stopped and searched compared to White people. In a bid to count...

We study the design of promotions in an organization where agents belong to groups that advance their cause. Examples and applications include political groups, ethnicities, agents motivated by the work in the public sector and corruption. In an overlapping generations model, juniors compete for promotions. Seniors have two kinds of discretion: direct discretion which allows an immediate advanc...

Credible delegation of discretion obtains when it is a rational strategy for managers not to overrule employee decisions that are based on delegated decision rights or renege on the level of delegated discretion (and this is common knowledge). Making delegation of discretion credible becomes a crucial issue when organizations want to sustain the advantages that may flow from delegation: Such ad...

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. We show experimentally that complementarities between high effort discretion, rent-sharing, screening opportunities, and competition are important driving forces behind these “high-performance work systems.” We document the endog...

This study&rsquos goal is determining the accurate relationship of central bank with its environment through recognizing the conditions of this bank in four aspects of autogeny(internal authority), heterogeny (interaction), discretion(influence in environment) and detachment (organization self usage of it's resources) . This study is discovery and survey in terms of method. Collecting data tool...

Discretion is the thesis that if one has sufficient evidence for p, it is epistemically permissible for one either to believe p or be agnostic on whether p. This paper argues that Discretion is not as obvious as many assume—indeed, that it is false. §1 observes that Discretion is not supported by the fact that we lack positive epistemic duties to take doxastic stances on propositions. §2 consid...