University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The sponsor strikes back: Interacting with a budget-maximizing bureau

Lawrence, Bruce Alan

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Description

Title
The sponsor strikes back: Interacting with a budget-maximizing bureau
Author(s)
Lawrence, Bruce Alan
Issue Date
1990
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Brueckner, Jan K.
Department of Study
  • Economics, General
  • Economics, Theory
  • Political Science, Public Administration
Discipline
  • Economics, General
  • Economics, Theory
  • Political Science, Public Administration
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Economics, General
  • Economics, Theory
  • Political Science, Public Administration
Language
eng
Abstract
This thesis is in two parts. The first part is an extensive literature survey that summarizes and synthesizes several works on bureaucracy from sociology, business administration, and political science as well as economics, prominently featuring selections from Herbert Simon, Anthony Downs, William Niskanen, Migue and Belanger, and Breton and Wintrobe. The second part assumes a bureau that maximizes its budget, a la Niskanen, or its slack resources, a la Migue and Belanger, and explores, through mathematical models of bureau-sponsor interaction, the possibility for the sponsor to get a better deal from the bureau. The major conclusion is that a bureau's sponsor can extract greater surplus from the bureau by understating its demand for the bureau's service. The sponsor may do this by deceiving the bureau or by publicly binding itself, perhaps by political commitment, to a lower demand. Finally, a model is proposed where the sponsor has its own incentives for large government programs, which may reinforce the budget-maximizing bureau's tendency toward overproduction. This formulation makes explicit the usually implicit assumptions about alternative (private) suppliers of the bureau's service, and approaches the sponsor's own demand for large government output in a way different from Niskanen's.
Type of Resource
text
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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/22967
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 1990 Lawrence, Bruce Alan

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Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois
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