Jonathan Bendor
Biographic Data
| ID | 248508 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Bendor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Bendor |
| SIGNATURE | BENDOR J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6066-0815 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1123 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
On Accountability and Hierarchy
Democracy promises accountability via elections; bureaucracy promises coordination via hierarchy. Many scholars believe these properties conflict. We prove, however, that accountability is precisely what unifies democracy and meritocratic (Weberian) bureaucracy. Central to the concept of meritocracy are performance reviews. We prove that a review system where all individuals and groups are accountable must also be democratic. Thus, meritocratic h…
Between Michigan and Rochester: Identity-based thinking is cognitively primary
This article synthesizes a large body of research in the social and cognitive sciences to develop a distinctly cognitive understanding of political identity. Building on dual-process and computational theories of mind, the article defends three claims about the mental and behavioral implications of identity in political domains: (1) identity-based thinking is people's default (often fast, automatic, and cognitively inaccessible) way of mentally r…
Lethal Incompetence: Leaders, Organizations, and the U.S. Response to Covid-19
The study of voter competence has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, but at this point there are diminishing returns to the endeavor. Voter competence is unlikely to improve dramatically enough to make much of a difference to our politics. By contrast, the competence of officials can and does vary substantially over short periods of time. To understand variations in government performance, therefore, we would do bett…
Historical Contingencies in the Evolution of States and Their Militaries
Historians and some scholars of international relations have long argued that historical contingencies play a critical role in the evolution of the international system, but have not explained whether they do so to a greater extent than in other domains or why such differences may exist. The authors address these lacunae by identifying stable differences between war and other policy domains that render the evolution of the international system mo…
Inequality, Aspirations, and Social Comparisons
We develop a model of adaptive learning with social comparisons. Actors are more likely to choose actions that recently yielded satisfactory payoffs; satisfaction is evaluated relative to an aspiration level that reflects previous payoffs and possibly other players’ payoffs. This captures the phenomenon of social comparison viareference groups. We show that if agents compare themselves to those who are receiving higher payoffs then in stable outc…
Incrementalism: Dead yet Flourishing
Charles Lindblom's 1959 essay “The Science of ‘Muddling Through’” is best known for the strategy of decision making—disjointed incrementalism—that it recommended. That famous paper and Lindblom's related work also provided two theories: a critique of the conventional method (the synoptic approach) and an argument for using incrementalism instead. Both are applied theories: they are designed to help solve complex policy problems. Lindblom's negati…
Adaptively Rational Retrospective Voting
Since the seminal work of Key (1966), Kramer (1971), and Nordhaus (1975), retrospective voting has been a major component of voting theory. However, although these views are alive empirically (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000; Franzese, 2002; Hibbs, 2006), most theorizing assumes rational citizens. We suspect that Key had a less heroic view of voter cognition, and we formalize his verbal theory accordingly. Our model is based on two axioms: if an i…
The Adaptive Dynamics of Turnout
We present a dynamic model of turnout in which voters’ behavior in one election depends only on whether they voted in the last election and whether their party won. This assumption may be justified by assuming citizens satisfice or by assuming they adjust subjective beliefs about being pivotal in ways that depend on whether they voted and on the outcome of the election. Regardless of the individual-level mechanism, the assumption that prior voter…
Social Comparisons in Games
Communitarian versus Universalistic Norms
The celebration of communitarianism by political philosophers (Sandel 1982) has apparently been extended to strategic analyses of ascriptively attuned norms (Fearon and Laitin 1996) — an intriguing development, given game theory’s individualistic premises. We believe, however, that game theory offers little comfort to prescriptive theories of communitarian rules: a hardheaded strategic analysis supports the Enlightenment view that such norms tend…
Lethal Incompetence: Voters, Officials, and Systems
The study of voter competence has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, but at this point there are diminishing returns to the endeavor. There is little reason, in theory or in practice, to expect voter competence to improve dramatically enough to make much of a difference, but there is reason to think that officials’ competence can vary enough to make large differences. To understand variations in government performanc…
The Perfect is the Enemy of the Best: Adaptive versus Optimal Organizational Reliability
Organizations such as the Food and Drug Agency can make both type I (approving bad drugs) and type II errors (rejecting good ones). Optimal reliability entails balancing these two kinds of mistakes just so. This paper addresses the question of whether and when an imperfectly rational agency - in particular, one using an adaptive decision-making policy - would become optimally reliable. We establish a necessary condition that an adaptive scheme mu…
Spatial Models of Delegation
Although a large literature on delegation exists, few models have pushed beyond a core set of canonical assumptions. This approach may be justified on grounds of tractability, but the failure to grasp the significance of different assumptions and push beyond specific models has limited our understanding of the incentives for delegation. Consequently, the justifications for delegation that have received recent scrutiny and testing differ from some…
H Erbert A. S Imon: Political Scientist
Although Herbert Simon's work is often cited by political scientists, it has not generated a large research program in the discipline. This is a waste of a major intellectual resource. The main challenge to the rational choice research program—now the most important research program in political science—can be developed by building on Simon's ideas on bounded rationality. The essay defends this assertion by examining how the work of both the earl…
A Behavioral Model of Turnout
The so-called “paradox of voting†is a major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational, then in large electrorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act worthwhile. Yet many people do vote, even in large national elections. To address this puzzle we construct a model of adaptive rationality: Citizens …
Theories Ofdelegation
We survey modern models of delegation that assume a boss and a subordinate pursue their own goals. Among the major themes covered are the following: the conditions under which the boss will prefer to delegate versus those in which she will prefer to retain authority; how a boss can induce a subordinate to truthfully reveal information; when rational principals will use the ally principle (i.e. delegate to agents with similar goals); delegation in…
Recycling the Garbage Can: An Assessment of the Research Program
The garbage can theory of organizational choice is one of the best-known innovations in modern organization theory. It also has significantly shaped a major branch of the new institutionalism. Yet, the theory has not received the systematic assessment that it both deserves and needs. We evaluate the early verbal theory and argue that it fails to create an adequate foundation for scientific progress. We then analyze and rerun Cohen, March, and Ols…
The Evolution of Norms
Social norms that induce us to reward or punish people not for what they did to us but for what they did to other members of one’s group have long been thought as sine qua non sociological and thus impossible to explain in terms of rational choice. This article shows how social norms can be deductively derived from principles of (boundedly) rational choice as mechanisms that are necessary to stabilize behaviors in a large class of evolutionary ga…
Comparing Centralized and Decentralized Institutions: A Reply to Schwartz and Tomz
Schwartz and Tomz (1997) have correctly pointed out an error in our 1987 article: We had neglected to analyze how changes in group composition improve the performance of centralized institutions over time. The change affects only the case of perfect monitoring, however. We argue, moreover, that even in this special context, our main qualitative conclusion—that the centralized structure has no positive advantage over the decentralized one—continue…
The Evolutionary Stability of Cooperation
Is cooperation without central authority stable? If so, how robust is it? Despite what might be the conventional wisdom,The Evolution of Cooperationdid not solve this problem deductively. In fact, results obtained later by others seem to have contradicted the book's main message. Reexamining this exceptionally influential work yields a new picture. Part of Axelrod's evolutionary story turns out to be false. But the main intuition, that retaliator…
Cooperation Under Uncertainty: What is New, What is True, and What is Important
A Model of Muddling Through
As arguments about the effectiveness of "muddling through" have proven frustratingly inconclusive, incrementalism-once a major approach to the study of boundedly rational policy processes-has gone dormant. In an attempt to revitalize the debate, I present a formal model of muddling through. The model, by clarifying the logical structure of the informal theory, presents a clearer target for criticism. More importantly, it establishes numerous dedu…
The Fields of Bureaucracy and Public Administration: Basic and Applied Research
The Fields of Bureaucracy and Public Administration: Basic and Applied Research Get access Jonathan Bendor Jonathan Bendor Stanford University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Volume 4, Issue 1, January 1994, Pages 27–40, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jpart.a037190 Published: 01 January 1994
Uncertainty and the Evolution of Cooperation
It is well known that inferential errors can induce nice but provocable strategies to engage in vendettas with each other. It is therefore generally believed that imperfect monitoring reduces the payoffs of such strategies and impairs the evolution of cooperation. The current literature, however, only scrutinizes specific strategies, either analytically or in particular tournaments. This article examines in a more general way how monitoring uncer…
Rethinking Allison's Models
The ideas in Graham Allison'sEssence of Decision(1971) have had an enormous impact on the study and teaching of bureaucracy and foreign policy making. While Allison's work has received considerable critical attention, there has been surprisingly little examination of the content and internal logic of his models. We subject each of Allison's three models to a systematic critical analysis. Our conclusion is that the models require substantial refor…
Theories Ofdelegation
We survey modern models of delegation that assume a boss and a subordinate pursue their own goals. Among the major themes covered are the following: the conditions under which the boss will prefer to delegate versus those in which she will prefer to retain authority; how a boss can induce a subordinate to truthfully reveal information; when rational principals will use the ally principle (i.e. delegate to agents with similar goals); delegation in…
Spatial Models of Delegation
Although a large literature on delegation exists, few models have pushed beyond a core set of canonical assumptions. This approach may be justified on grounds of tractability, but the failure to grasp the significance of different assumptions and push beyond specific models has limited our understanding of the incentives for delegation. Consequently, the justifications for delegation that have received recent scrutiny and testing differ from some…
Rethinking Allison's Models
The ideas in Graham Allison'sEssence of Decision(1971) have had an enormous impact on the study and teaching of bureaucracy and foreign policy making. While Allison's work has received considerable critical attention, there has been surprisingly little examination of the content and internal logic of his models. We subject each of Allison's three models to a systematic critical analysis. Our conclusion is that the models require substantial refor…
An Adaptive Model of Bureaucratic Politics
In this article we outline a new framework for the formal analysis of bureaucratic politics. It departs from standard neoclassical approaches, notably those of Niskanen (1971) and Peltzman (1976), in several important respects. First our approach explicitly models a system of three-way interaction among bureaus, politicians, and interest groups. Second, it allows for institutional features of each type of participant. Third, it is a model of dyna…
Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Asymmetric Information
In the analysis of the budgetary game between politicians and bureaucrats, the emphasis has been on the politicians' uncertainties about bureaucratic performance and the ensuing advantages enjoyed by nonelected officials. Such a perspective neglects the uncertainties that bureaucrats must confront. This paper models these dual uncertainties-superiors about subordinates, subordinates about superiors-where each party uses its informational advantag…
Institutional Structure and the Logic of Ongoing Collective Action
Work by Axelrod, Hardin, and Taylor indicates that problems of repeated collective action may lessen if people use decentralized strategies of reciprocity to induce mutual cooperation. Hobbes's centralized solution may thus be overrated. We investigate these issues by representing ongoing collective action as an n-person repeated prisoner's dilemma. The results show that decentralized conditional cooperation can ease iterated collective action di…
Bureaucratic Expertise versus Legislative Authority: A Model of Deception and Monitoring in Budgeting
The empirical literature on the control of bureaus notes that politicians have difficulty observing bureaucratic output, but this insight is rarely represented informal models. To analyze how bureaus use this uncertainty strategically, we develop a model of expertise-based agenda control, building on the Niskanen (1971) and Miller and Moe (1983) tradition. We show that under some plausible conditions, bureaus will underestimate the benefits, and …
The Evolution of Norms
Social norms that induce us to reward or punish people not for what they did to us but for what they did to other members of one’s group have long been thought as sine qua non sociological and thus impossible to explain in terms of rational choice. This article shows how social norms can be deductively derived from principles of (boundedly) rational choice as mechanisms that are necessary to stabilize behaviors in a large class of evolutionary ga…
A Behavioral Model of Turnout
The so-called “paradox of voting†is a major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational, then in large electrorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act worthwhile. Yet many people do vote, even in large national elections. To address this puzzle we construct a model of adaptive rationality: Citizens …
The Evolutionary Stability of Cooperation
Is cooperation without central authority stable? If so, how robust is it? Despite what might be the conventional wisdom,The Evolution of Cooperationdid not solve this problem deductively. In fact, results obtained later by others seem to have contradicted the book's main message. Reexamining this exceptionally influential work yields a new picture. Part of Axelrod's evolutionary story turns out to be false. But the main intuition, that retaliator…
When in Doubt: Cooperation in a Noisy Prisoner's Dilemma
In the last decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in problems of cooperation, stimulated largely by Axelrod's work. Using an innovative tournament approach, Axelrod found that a simple strategy, tit-for-tat (TFT), was most successful in playing the repeated prisoner's dilemma (PD) in a noiseless environment. However, recent analytical work has shown that monitoring problems caused by noise significantly impair TFT's effectiveness. The p…
Formal Models of Bureaucracy
Formal analysis is fairly new in public administration, and there is some scepticism in the field about the intellectual advantages of mathematical methods. This is appropriate. Using these methods is now faddish, and fads can cause goal displacement. A formal model of bureaucracy should be only a tool for deepening our knowledge about public organizations. If the underlying ideas are silly, translating them into mathematics will do little good. …
Recycling the Garbage Can: An Assessment of the Research Program
The garbage can theory of organizational choice is one of the best-known innovations in modern organization theory. It also has significantly shaped a major branch of the new institutionalism. Yet, the theory has not received the systematic assessment that it both deserves and needs. We evaluate the early verbal theory and argue that it fails to create an adequate foundation for scientific progress. We then analyze and rerun Cohen, March, and Ols…
In Good Times and Bad: Reciprocity in an Uncertain World
Axelrod's work has demonstrated that tit-for-tat is an extremely robust strategy in the repeated two-person prisoner's dilemma. However, most analyses and experiments of the repeated game have assumed perfect monitoring: each player either can observe his partner's choice directly or can infer it perfectly after observing the outcome. Yet in many real dilemmas, outcomes are functions of exogenous events as well as the players' moves, and it is of…
Stacking the Deck: Bureaucratic Missions and Policy Design
Empirical studies suggest that mission-oriented bureaucrats bias their design of program alternatives to increase the odds that a superior will choose the kind of program the officials want. However, political executives may anticipate this manipulation and try to reassert control. These struggles are examined in three models. In Model 1 a senior bureaucrat is interested only in missions; the bureaucrat's political superior controls him or her by…
A Model of Muddling Through
As arguments about the effectiveness of "muddling through" have proven frustratingly inconclusive, incrementalism-once a major approach to the study of boundedly rational policy processes-has gone dormant. In an attempt to revitalize the debate, I present a formal model of muddling through. The model, by clarifying the logical structure of the informal theory, presents a clearer target for criticism. More importantly, it establishes numerous dedu…
H Erbert A. S Imon: Political Scientist
Although Herbert Simon's work is often cited by political scientists, it has not generated a large research program in the discipline. This is a waste of a major intellectual resource. The main challenge to the rational choice research program—now the most important research program in political science—can be developed by building on Simon's ideas on bounded rationality. The essay defends this assertion by examining how the work of both the earl…
Uncertainty and the Evolution of Cooperation
It is well known that inferential errors can induce nice but provocable strategies to engage in vendettas with each other. It is therefore generally believed that imperfect monitoring reduces the payoffs of such strategies and impairs the evolution of cooperation. The current literature, however, only scrutinizes specific strategies, either analytically or in particular tournaments. This article examines in a more general way how monitoring uncer…
Agenda Control, Committee Capture, and the Dynamics of Institutional Politics
Most models of agenda control examine dyadic relations—for example, those between a committee and the floor of a legislature. Such relations, however, are always embedded in a larger context, namely, a political environment composed of voters and interest groups. In this paper we model agenda setters (a legislative committee) as decision makers with limited cognitive abilities who adjust over time to their larger political environment. The legisl…
Adaptively Rational Retrospective Voting
Since the seminal work of Key (1966), Kramer (1971), and Nordhaus (1975), retrospective voting has been a major component of voting theory. However, although these views are alive empirically (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000; Franzese, 2002; Hibbs, 2006), most theorizing assumes rational citizens. We suspect that Key had a less heroic view of voter cognition, and we formalize his verbal theory accordingly. Our model is based on two axioms: if an i…
The Fields of Bureaucracy and Public Administration: Basic and Applied Research
The Fields of Bureaucracy and Public Administration: Basic and Applied Research Get access Jonathan Bendor Jonathan Bendor Stanford University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Volume 4, Issue 1, January 1994, Pages 27–40, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jpart.a037190 Published: 01 January 1994
Lethal Incompetence: Voters, Officials, and Systems
The study of voter competence has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, but at this point there are diminishing returns to the endeavor. There is little reason, in theory or in practice, to expect voter competence to improve dramatically enough to make much of a difference, but there is reason to think that officials’ competence can vary enough to make large differences. To understand variations in government performanc…
Historical Contingencies in the Evolution of States and Their Militaries
Historians and some scholars of international relations have long argued that historical contingencies play a critical role in the evolution of the international system, but have not explained whether they do so to a greater extent than in other domains or why such differences may exist. The authors address these lacunae by identifying stable differences between war and other policy domains that render the evolution of the international system mo…
The Adaptive Dynamics of Turnout
We present a dynamic model of turnout in which voters’ behavior in one election depends only on whether they voted in the last election and whether their party won. This assumption may be justified by assuming citizens satisfice or by assuming they adjust subjective beliefs about being pivotal in ways that depend on whether they voted and on the outcome of the election. Regardless of the individual-level mechanism, the assumption that prior voter…
Cooperation Under Uncertainty: What is New, What is True, and What is Important
A Theoretical Problem in Comparative Administration
It is well known that the developmental model has encountered severe empirical, methodological, and theoretical difficulties. It is, however, not easy to discard an idea when there are no substitutes. Accordingly, an alternative theory-one borrowing biological notions of evolution-is offered as a replacement. Because many scholars have failed to distinguish development from evolution, the properties of the two models are spelled out and their dif…
Parallel Systems: Redundancy in Government
An Adaptive Model of Bureaucratic Politics
In this article we outline a new framework for the formal analysis of bureaucratic politics. It departs from standard neoclassical approaches, notably those of Niskanen (1971) and Peltzman (1976), in several important respects. First our approach explicitly models a system of three-way interaction among bureaus, politicians, and interest groups. Second, it allows for institutional features of each type of participant. Third, it is a model of dyna…
Bureaucratic Expertise versus Legislative Authority: A Model of Deception and Monitoring in Budgeting
The empirical literature on the control of bureaus notes that politicians have difficulty observing bureaucratic output, but this insight is rarely represented informal models. To analyze how bureaus use this uncertainty strategically, we develop a model of expertise-based agenda control, building on the Niskanen (1971) and Miller and Moe (1983) tradition. We show that under some plausible conditions, bureaus will underestimate the benefits, and …
Agenda Control, Committee Capture, and the Dynamics of Institutional Politics
Most models of agenda control examine dyadic relations—for example, those between a committee and the floor of a legislature. Such relations, however, are always embedded in a larger context, namely, a political environment composed of voters and interest groups. In this paper we model agenda setters (a legislative committee) as decision makers with limited cognitive abilities who adjust over time to their larger political environment. The legisl…
Limits to Bureaucratic Growth. Marshall W. Meyer , William Stevenson , Stephen Webster
Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Asymmetric Information
In the analysis of the budgetary game between politicians and bureaucrats, the emphasis has been on the politicians' uncertainties about bureaucratic performance and the ensuing advantages enjoyed by nonelected officials. Such a perspective neglects the uncertainties that bureaucrats must confront. This paper models these dual uncertainties-superiors about subordinates, subordinates about superiors-where each party uses its informational advantag…
In Good Times and Bad: Reciprocity in an Uncertain World
Axelrod's work has demonstrated that tit-for-tat is an extremely robust strategy in the repeated two-person prisoner's dilemma. However, most analyses and experiments of the repeated game have assumed perfect monitoring: each player either can observe his partner's choice directly or can infer it perfectly after observing the outcome. Yet in many real dilemmas, outcomes are functions of exogenous events as well as the players' moves, and it is of…
Institutional Structure and the Logic of Ongoing Collective Action
Work by Axelrod, Hardin, and Taylor indicates that problems of repeated collective action may lessen if people use decentralized strategies of reciprocity to induce mutual cooperation. Hobbes's centralized solution may thus be overrated. We investigate these issues by representing ongoing collective action as an n-person repeated prisoner's dilemma. The results show that decentralized conditional cooperation can ease iterated collective action di…
Stacking the Deck: Bureaucratic Missions and Policy Design
Empirical studies suggest that mission-oriented bureaucrats bias their design of program alternatives to increase the odds that a superior will choose the kind of program the officials want. However, political executives may anticipate this manipulation and try to reassert control. These struggles are examined in three models. In Model 1 a senior bureaucrat is interested only in missions; the bureaucrat's political superior controls him or her by…
Formal Models of Bureaucracy
Formal analysis is fairly new in public administration, and there is some scepticism in the field about the intellectual advantages of mathematical methods. This is appropriate. Using these methods is now faddish, and fads can cause goal displacement. A formal model of bureaucracy should be only a tool for deepening our knowledge about public organizations. If the underlying ideas are silly, translating them into mathematics will do little good. …
When in Doubt: Cooperation in a Noisy Prisoner's Dilemma
In the last decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in problems of cooperation, stimulated largely by Axelrod's work. Using an innovative tournament approach, Axelrod found that a simple strategy, tit-for-tat (TFT), was most successful in playing the repeated prisoner's dilemma (PD) in a noiseless environment. However, recent analytical work has shown that monitoring problems caused by noise significantly impair TFT's effectiveness. The p…
Rethinking Allison's Models
The ideas in Graham Allison'sEssence of Decision(1971) have had an enormous impact on the study and teaching of bureaucracy and foreign policy making. While Allison's work has received considerable critical attention, there has been surprisingly little examination of the content and internal logic of his models. We subject each of Allison's three models to a systematic critical analysis. Our conclusion is that the models require substantial refor…
Uncertainty and the Evolution of Cooperation
It is well known that inferential errors can induce nice but provocable strategies to engage in vendettas with each other. It is therefore generally believed that imperfect monitoring reduces the payoffs of such strategies and impairs the evolution of cooperation. The current literature, however, only scrutinizes specific strategies, either analytically or in particular tournaments. This article examines in a more general way how monitoring uncer…
The Fields of Bureaucracy and Public Administration: Basic and Applied Research
The Fields of Bureaucracy and Public Administration: Basic and Applied Research Get access Jonathan Bendor Jonathan Bendor Stanford University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Volume 4, Issue 1, January 1994, Pages 27–40, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jpart.a037190 Published: 01 January 1994
A Model of Muddling Through
As arguments about the effectiveness of "muddling through" have proven frustratingly inconclusive, incrementalism-once a major approach to the study of boundedly rational policy processes-has gone dormant. In an attempt to revitalize the debate, I present a formal model of muddling through. The model, by clarifying the logical structure of the informal theory, presents a clearer target for criticism. More importantly, it establishes numerous dedu…
Cooperation Under Uncertainty: What is New, What is True, and What is Important
Comparing Centralized and Decentralized Institutions: A Reply to Schwartz and Tomz
Schwartz and Tomz (1997) have correctly pointed out an error in our 1987 article: We had neglected to analyze how changes in group composition improve the performance of centralized institutions over time. The change affects only the case of perfect monitoring, however. We argue, moreover, that even in this special context, our main qualitative conclusion—that the centralized structure has no positive advantage over the decentralized one—continue…
The Evolutionary Stability of Cooperation
Is cooperation without central authority stable? If so, how robust is it? Despite what might be the conventional wisdom,The Evolution of Cooperationdid not solve this problem deductively. In fact, results obtained later by others seem to have contradicted the book's main message. Reexamining this exceptionally influential work yields a new picture. Part of Axelrod's evolutionary story turns out to be false. But the main intuition, that retaliator…
Theories Ofdelegation
We survey modern models of delegation that assume a boss and a subordinate pursue their own goals. Among the major themes covered are the following: the conditions under which the boss will prefer to delegate versus those in which she will prefer to retain authority; how a boss can induce a subordinate to truthfully reveal information; when rational principals will use the ally principle (i.e. delegate to agents with similar goals); delegation in…
Recycling the Garbage Can: An Assessment of the Research Program
The garbage can theory of organizational choice is one of the best-known innovations in modern organization theory. It also has significantly shaped a major branch of the new institutionalism. Yet, the theory has not received the systematic assessment that it both deserves and needs. We evaluate the early verbal theory and argue that it fails to create an adequate foundation for scientific progress. We then analyze and rerun Cohen, March, and Ols…
The Evolution of Norms
Social norms that induce us to reward or punish people not for what they did to us but for what they did to other members of one’s group have long been thought as sine qua non sociological and thus impossible to explain in terms of rational choice. This article shows how social norms can be deductively derived from principles of (boundedly) rational choice as mechanisms that are necessary to stabilize behaviors in a large class of evolutionary ga…
H Erbert A. S Imon: Political Scientist
Although Herbert Simon's work is often cited by political scientists, it has not generated a large research program in the discipline. This is a waste of a major intellectual resource. The main challenge to the rational choice research program—now the most important research program in political science—can be developed by building on Simon's ideas on bounded rationality. The essay defends this assertion by examining how the work of both the earl…
A Behavioral Model of Turnout
The so-called “paradox of voting†is a major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational, then in large electrorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act worthwhile. Yet many people do vote, even in large national elections. To address this puzzle we construct a model of adaptive rationality: Citizens …
Spatial Models of Delegation
Although a large literature on delegation exists, few models have pushed beyond a core set of canonical assumptions. This approach may be justified on grounds of tractability, but the failure to grasp the significance of different assumptions and push beyond specific models has limited our understanding of the incentives for delegation. Consequently, the justifications for delegation that have received recent scrutiny and testing differ from some…
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