Timothy Besley’s Principled Agents? carefully surveys the modern social science literature on political agency problems and tries to chart a sensible middle course between the naive assumption that politicians maximize the public welfare and the pessimism of Virginia-style public choice. However, the literature that Besley showcases is seriously flawed. By building on the empirically discredite...

I examine a model in which multiple legislative principals monitor a bureaucratic agent’s implementation of a project. The principals can each perform oversight of the implementation to limit information asymmetries exploited by the agent. Oversight is costly to perform and due to information leakages between principals, oversight by one principal reveals information to all principals. Thus for...

We study common agency problems in which principals (groups) make costly commitments to incentives that are conditioned on imperfect signals of the agent’s action. Our framework allows for incentives to be either rewards or punishments and an equilibrium always exists. For our canonical example with two principals we obtain a unique equilibrium, which typically involves randomization by both pr...

I examine a model in which a bureaucrat performs a project for multiple legislative principals. The cost of the project is publicly observable but the bureaucrat’s (exogenous) efficiency and (endogenous) cost reducing activities are not. The principals can each perform a costly audit of the bureaucrat’s type for use in the design of incentive schemes, and the information may also be useful for ...

The present study examined the relationships between leadership styles and decision-making styles among public schools principals. A total of 108 principals returned questionnaires from Russaifa Education District in Jordan. The Decision Style Inventory and the Administrative Styles Questionnaire were used in this study. "Directive decision making style" was predominant among school principals,...

This study investigated principals’ leadership styles and teachers’ job performance in senior secondary schools in Ondo State, Nigeria. The study population comprised all the 281 secondary schools in the State. Out of this population, a sample of 240 senior secondary schools was taken and selected through the stratified random sampling technique. Out of the 7460 teachers (including principals) ...

This paper analyzes contactual situations between many principals and many agents. Agents have private information and principals take actions. Principals can contract not only on the reports of the agents but also on the contracts offered by the other principals. Contracts are required to be representable in a formal language. The main result of the paper is a full characterization of the allo...

Existing research that estimates principals’ effects on student achievement has employed value-added models that have only limited usefulness for actual performance evaluation systems. Principals’ effects are typically identified through school leadership changes, meaning that effectiveness data cannot be generated for all principals and that effects are comparable only within small groups of s...

This descriptive study used an online survey to determine how principals in two states viewed the supervision of marginal teachers. Principals ranked their own evaluation of the teacher as the most important factor when identifying marginal teachers and relied on informal methods to diagnose marginal teaching. Female principals rated a majority of supervisory methods and data sources as being m...

We conduct a laboratory experiment with agents working on and principals benefiting from a real effort task in which the agents’ performance can only be evaluated subjectively. Principals give subjective performance feedback to agents and agents have an opportunity to sanction principals. In contrast to existing models of reciprocity we find that agents tend to sanction whenever the feedback of...