International surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate. At the same time, social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate...

The paper develops an agency-theoretic approach to interest-group politics and shows the following: (1) the organizational response to the possibility of regulatory agency politics is to reduce the stakes interest groups have in regulation; (2) the threat of producer protection leads to...

The paper discusses some specificities of the design of incentives in the public sector and their implications: multiplicity of goals, unclear weighing of these goals, and nonmeasurability of some of them; lack of comparison; heterogeneity of tastes and dispersion of principals. The paper then...