Episode 41: Andrea Prat on the Allocation of Authority in Organizations

Andrea Prat is the Richard Paul Richman Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics at Columbia University.

The paper discussed in this episode is “The Allocation of Authority in Organizations: A Field Experiment with Bureaucrats”, by Oriana Bandiera, Michael Carlos Best, Adnan Qadir Khan, and Andrea Prat, and which was published at the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2021.

Other papers mentioned in this episode are:

Bandiera, O., Prat, A., & Valletti, T. (2009). Active and passive waste in government spending: evidence from a policy experiment. American Economic Review, 99(4), 1278-1308.

Liebman, J. B., & Mahoney, N. (2017). Do expiring budgets lead to wasteful year-end spending? Evidence from federal procurement. American Economic Review, 107(11), 3510-49.

NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE. 2006. Assessing the value for money of OGC buying solutions. https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/0607103.pdf