The canonical principal-agent problem involves a risk-neutral principal who must use incentives to motivate a risk-averse agent to take a costly, unobservable action that improves the principal’s payoff. The standard solution requires an inefficient shifting of risk to the agent. This...

The conventional wisdom holds that standing committees and subcommittees gain disproportionate influence over the policy decisions for which they have agenda control. Two solution concepts which make predictions about the influence of decentralized agenda setters are the structure-induced...

In contrast to principal-agency theory, the possibility of the political control of the bureaucracy depends on bureaucratic structure. In this article, I argue that the functional decentralization of responsibility and authority for policy formulation and implementation involves a net loss of...

This study defines and compares three broad theories that seek to explain bureaucratic preferences. I first argue that each of these explanations is complex — that no single measurable attribute encapsulates the entire theory. Second, I argue that these explanations are non-nested...