This article provides a comprehensive overview of how policy makers, practitioners, and scholars can fruitfully use behavioral science to tackle public administration, management, and policy issues. The article systematically reviews 109 articles in the public administration discipline that are inspired by the behavioral sciences to identify emerging research trajectories, significant gaps, and promising applied research directions. In an attempt to systematize and take stock of the nascent behavioral public administration scholarship, the authors trace it back to the seminal works of three Nobel Laureates—Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, and Richard Thaler—and their work on bounded rationality, cognitive biases, and nudging, respectively. The cognitive biases investigated by the studies reviewed fall into the categories of accessibility, loss aversion, and overconfidence/optimism. Nudging and choice architecture are discussed as viable strategies for leveraging these cognitive traps in an attempt to alter behavior for the better, among both citizens and public servants.

What can we learn by applying a meta-analysis to the public administration literature on job satisfaction? More generally, how can public management scholars use this method to capitalize on the decades of research on other topics within our field? This study reports the findings of the first quantitative review of the public administration literature on job satisfaction. We retrieved quantitative data from primary studies published in 42 public administration journals since 1969 and performed a meta-analysis of the relationships between job satisfaction and 43 correlates. The findings include meta-analytically derived effect sizes, measures of the heterogeneity in the effect size underlying all primary studies, and several indicators of publication bias. In presenting the results of our meta-analysis, we address the merits and limitations of this methodology and discuss how public administration scholars could take full advantage of this information to advance knowledge in other areas within the field.

This article tests a broad range of cognitive biases branching out from prospect theory in the context of public policy and management. Results illuminate systematic deviations from rationality. In experiments 1 through 5, the framing of outcomes influenced decisions across policy and management domains. In experiment 6, public employees were prone to an anchoring bias when setting standards for responsiveness. Experiment 7 shows that public workers tend to put more effort into activities that affect higher percentages of beneficiaries, even if the absolute number of affected clients is constant. Experiments 8 and 9 suggest that public employees are more likely to stick to a suboptimal status quo as the number of superior alternatives increases. Experiment 10 provides evidence of an asymmetric dominance effect: decisions changed when a decoy was present. This article contributes to behavioral public administration by replicating and extending previous trials. Evidence for Practice• Being humans rather than robots, civil servants are prone to cognitive biases that may hinder public service provision. • As these cognitive biases are systematic rather than random, the architects of public organizations and services should account for them when designing the architecture of jobs and tasks. • Supposedly irrelevant factors that predictably affect decisions include the framing of outcomes, anchors, multiple alternatives, and decoy options. Research Article

Combining insights from public administration, accounting, and psychology, this article explores the microprocesses by which public managers use performance information, investigating whether the type of performance information use and the request to justify decisions affect the way in which information is processed. The study draws on data from a series of artifactual survey experiments with Italian municipal executives. Findings show that managers process information differently under ex post rather than ex ante performance information uses. More specifically, managers are more likely to be subject to framing bias under ex post than under ex ante uses of performance information. This interaction seems to be robust when subjects are asked to provide justification for their decisions. Evidence for Practice• Managers will process performance information differently depending on its use. • Managers are less prone to framing bias under ex ante uses of performance information (e.g., allocation of resources) than under ex post uses (e.g., performance evaluation). • Asking managers to provide justification for their decisions may not be sufficient to reduce framing effects. • Increased attention should be given to avoid framing effects, especially in ex post uses of performance information, as this could affect the fairness of evaluation processes, performance-related sanctions, and rewards.

A systematic literature review of performance appraisal in a selection of public administration journals revealed a lack of investigations on the cognitive biases that affect raters’ evaluation of ratees’ performance. To address this gap, we conducted two artefactual field experiments on a sample of 600 public sector managers and employees. Results show that anchoring and halo effects systematically biased performance ratings. For the former, average scores were higher when subjects were exposed to a high rather than a low anchor. For the latter, higher ability on one performance dimension led participants to provide a higher average score on another performance dimension. Halo effect was moderated by rater’s gender. We conclude by discussing the study limitations and providing suggestions for future work in this area.