Hierarchy and Information
What determines the distribution of information acquired within the hierarchy of a public organization? Without market processes, the generation and absorption of information in bureaucracy relies on individual actors undertaking costly action to a...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/474061541787560854/Hierarchy-and-Information http://hdl.handle.net/10986/30850 |
| Summary: | What determines the distribution of
information acquired within the hierarchy of a public
organization? Without market processes, the generation and
absorption of information in bureaucracy relies on
individual actors undertaking costly action to acquire it.
This paper reports on comparisons between individual-level
claims by public officials in the Government of Ethiopia
regarding the characteristics of local constituents they
serve and objective benchmark data. Public officials make
large errors about their constituents' characteristics.
The errors of 49 percent of public officials are at least 50
percent of the underlying benchmark data. Given public
officials' stated reliance on this information to make
public policy decisions, such mistakes imply a substantial
misallocation of public resources. The results are
consistent with classic theoretical predictions related to
the incentives that determine information acquisition in
hierarchies, such as de facto control over decision making
and an organizational culture of valuing operational
information. A field experiment implies that these
incentives mediate the effectiveness of interventions aimed
at improving the information of public-sector agents. |
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