Decisions and Organizations
The core course on management for public policy will cover two main topics: managerial decision making and incentives.
Managerial decision making: We'll start with a comparison of the normative framework that economists use to think about rational choice and the experimental evidence that psychologists use to argue that real-world decision makers do not satisfy those normative criteria. This unit is useful both for guidance about ways to improve the students own decision making as practitioners, and as background for thinking about the currently fashionable "nudging" or "libertarian paternalism" approach to social policy.
Incentives: In any organization, control over actions will be at least partly decentralized. And that immediately implies that the managers must design incentives so that theses private decisions are made in ways that advance, rather than retard, the organizations goals. We will address this general theme in the context of designing incentives for agents who must work on several tasks, who work in teams, and who are concerned with pleasing outside audiences. Applications will be drawn from education, law enforcement, and agency level rule-making.
