Trust in public performance information: The effect of data accessibility and data source

Social impact bonds (SIBs), also known as Pay for Success, are an innovation in Payment by Results contracting. Investors finance programs and are repaid based on the “SIB effect,” which includes changes in outcomes attributable to financing. We generate a quantitative estimate of this part of the SIB effect for two active labor market programs in the Netherlands and Switzerland. Comparing program impacts within providers using SIB and non‐SIB contracts suggests financing has positive impacts on public benefit receipt, employment, and income. Qualitative research suggests this is because SIB contracts increased pressure for all involved parties, leading to the institutionalization of selection and greater resources for SIB‐financed services. Contracts with high pressure, like SIBs, may compromise both performance requirements and the potential to measure performance. We examine the implications of these findings in relation to agency and stewardship theories and highlight the significance of SIBs as multilateral as opposed to bilateral contracts.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of social impact bond financing

Hevenstone

Fraser

Hobi

et al. 2023

“…As the article title implies, these findings suggest that police officers do not blindly trust AI technologies, but follow AI recommendations that confirm their preconceived preferences. Schmidthuber, Willems, and Krabina (2023) utilize a series of online experiments in large-N data collections in Austria and Germany to explore the effect of data accessibility and data source provision on trust in performance information; they find increases in both cases. Whereas citizens have more trust in government-provided data relative to data provided by other citizens, source reputation is essential for building trust in performance information.…”

Section: In This Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond social equity: Talking social justice in public administration

Stivers

Pandey

DeHart‐Davis

et al. 2023

PAR Editorials seek to raise the salience of important public administration themes. Social justice is one of the defining themes of our times and in this editorial statement, we clarify some basic issues and offer a vision for future scholarship and practice. This statement is co-authored with notable public administration scholars, many affiliated with the Consortium of Race and Gender Scholars (CORGES). I am especially grateful to Cam Stivers, Sanjay Pandey, and Leisha DeHart-Davis for their leadership in crafting this editorial statement.

“…Prior literature on behavioral public administration in this area focuses on overall performance (James et al, 2020) and is generally concerned with issues of framing performance information (Belardinelli et al, 2018; James & Van Ryzin, 2019; Olsen, 2015; Pedersen, 2017), questions of blame avoidance (Marvel & Girth, 2016; Piatak, Mohn and Leland 2017; Johnson et al, 2019), trust in the data (Schmidthuber et al, 2023), or how public officials use such information (James et al, 2020 and the citations therein).…”

Section: The Theoretical and Empirical Tradeoff: Effectiveness Equity...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effectiveness, efficiency, and equity tradeoffs in public programs: A citizen experiment

Meier

Davis

2023

Debates over public programs frequently focus on questions of effectiveness, equity, and efficiency and the tradeoff among these objectives. Missing from the literature is whether the general public cares about these tradeoffs, can perceive such differences, and will act on them. This article reports on two pre‐registered vignette experiments where the effectiveness, equity, and efficiency are assessed relative to experimental treatments focused on U.S. K‐12 education involving test scores, equality of test scores, and program costs. One experiment focuses on equity in race and the other on equity in income. The experiments show that the general public perceives differences in program effectiveness and equity, values both, and is unwilling to tradeoff one for the other. The public cares about program costs, but it lacks a sophisticated understanding of efficiency as a concept. Inequalities in income appear to influence equity concerns more than those involving race.