Alternative models of regulatory decision making/legislative choice are presented and evaluated. A limited rationality model oriented to the common good is proposed as more complete and no less accurate than any of the more cynical alternatives. The implication of this model is that many...

Ineffective controllership is, perhaps, the most common managerial failure found in the public sector. This failure affects outcomes and achievements in every area of public policy - often profoundly. Controllers design and operate management-control systems. The effectiveness of alternative...

A good tax system must raise sufficient revenue – and do so fairly, efficiently, transparently, and coherently. How do the tax systems of the states stack up in terms of fairness, adequacy, and neutrality? To answer this question, we assess each state’s relative performance in terms of...

In this essay, we review the contributions economists, political scientists, and business scientists have made to an understanding of how local school districts, boards of education, school superintendents, and district offices affect student learning and other achievement outcomes of interest,...

This article shows how to design and organize the delivery of public services to promote the kinds of co-productive behavior needed to make public efforts effective. Second, it specifies human-resource management practices that foster an inclination on the part of public employees to encourage...

The efficacy of alternative institutional arrangements depends upon the information costs that obtain under each. The information revolution has dramatically transformed information costs and, therefore, the optimal placement of the boundary between government, non-governmental organizations,...

What are bid-protests? What functions do they perform? This article proposes that government contracting, especially the source-selection process, gives rise to a particularly intractable set of transactional hazards: governmental opportunism, involving elected officials and public employees,...

This literature survey distinguishes between public administration and economics, identifies some issues common to both fields and some reasons why public administration is not economics. Finally, it briefly surveys the contributions and limits of three bodies of economic literature that have in...

Public choice theorists generally assume that bureaucrats seek to maximize their own utility functions, subject to externally imposed constraints. Changes in constraint values may, therefore, be expected to result in predictable changes in the behavior of most organizations, not just businesses....

This inquiry concludes that America's bloated military base structure results less from demands for political 'pork' than from a decision-making process that inevitably results in a stalemate. This finding is encouraging. With a little imagination, we ought to be able to design a process that...