Differences in information between senders and receivers can result in inefficiency due to adverse selection or moral hazard. Therefore, one critical issue of organization design is how to induce truth-telling from the informed but biased agent by restructuring organizational forms. This study...

How to soften resistance to state-building efforts by reform losers? This paper highlights the strategy of compensation via the bureaucracy, in which the ruler offers meaningful government offices in exchange for elites’ acceptance of state-building reforms. We empirically explore this...

A long intellectual tradition starting with Max Weber views an ideal bureaucracy as a completely rule-based system. However, the net effect of discretionary appointment compared with a rule-based approach is theoretically ambiguous. Exploiting a unique setting in China’s imperial bureaucracy,...