This article details an approach for empirically eliciting and examining public service values and their impact on decisions made by public servants. The approach involves adaptation of the Schwartz Portrait Values Questionnaire such that it: (1) elicits values relevant to an individual's public service role rather than broad personal values; and (2) incorporates values omitted by the Schwartz framework, including those identified by Jørgensen and Bozeman and others. To examine the impact of public service values on specific public management decisions, we use structured decision context statements similar to those proposed by Tetlock. We find that: (1) the adapted instrument maps favourably to the Schwartz personal value space; (2) the public service values space includes value sets that expand and refine the personal value space defined by Schwartz; and (3) the public service values elicited can be used to predict decisions made by respondents in specific public service decision contexts.

In this empirical study, we examine whether systematic differences exist between government contracts with nonprofit and for-profit service providers. Based on principal–agent theory, we examine the potential comparative advantage of nonprofit organizations over for-profits in two areas: contracting process and contract performance. We test hypotheses using data from a national survey of local government contracts with private service providers. The results provide some support for the propositions that public officials trust nonprofits more than for-profits and grant them additional discretion. Even stronger support is found for the propositions that nonprofits are monitored less than for-profits and are awarded contracts of longer duration and for services characterized by higher levels of task uncertainty than those awarded to their for-profit counterparts. We find no significant differences in performance between nonprofit and for-profit contractors in terms of cost, quality of work, responsiveness to government requirements, legal compliance, or customer satisfaction.

Although a universal hierarchy of public values has proven elusive, the literature in individuallevel values suggests that decision makers do organize their personal values into hierarchies based on context. Through analysis of public values and public decision preferences gathered in a pilot study of city-level public administrators (n = 182), we use an empirical approach to identify context-relevant public values for five different decision contexts. We then demonstrate multiple possible approaches to modeling individual-and community-level policy preferences based on value hierarchies derived from the individual-level data. We find that the predictions based on value hierarchies are better than would be predicted in the absence of such hierarchies, and that these differences are statistically significant. These findings suggest that while creating a universal hierarchy of values remains challenging, context-relevant public value hierarchies at smaller units of analysis may be useful in describing, predicting, and explaining the decisions of public administrators.

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We hypothesize that the structural characteristics (i.e., centralization versus decentralization) of government aff ect the availability of training in values and skills that are fundamental to democratization. We test our hypothesis in statistical models predicting anticorruption training and policy skills training, using a model of technical skills training for comparison. We fi nd that centralized government structure signifi cantly increases the odds of receiving both anticorruption training and policy skills training. In contrast, we fi nd no statistical correlation between government structure and receipt of technical skills training. In light of these empirical results, we describe a theoretical paradox in civil service reform associated with democratization: While the end goal of such reform is decentralized government with local services and a professionalized civil service, reform itself may best supported by a centralized environment to achieve the democratic value and skills training needed to support transition to democracy.

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Collaboration and its promotion by funders continue to accelerate. Although research has identified significant transaction costs associated with collaboration, little empirical work has examined the broader, societal-level economic outcomes of a resource-sharing environment. Does an environment that encourages collaboration shift our focus toward certain types of social objectives and away from others? This paper uses agent-based Monte Carlo simulation to demonstrate that collaboration is particularly useful when resources are rare but a social objective is commonly held. However, collaboration can lead to bad outcomes when the objective is not commonly shared; in such cases, markets outperform collaborative arrangements. These findings suggest that encouraging a resourcesharing environment can lead to inefficiencies even worse than market failure. We also demonstrate that failure to account for transaction costs when prescribing collaboration can result in quantifiably lower outcome levels than expected.

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