Hierarchy and Information

The information public officials use to make decisions determines how public resources are distributed and the effectiveness of public policy. This paper develops a measurement approach for assessing the accuracy of a set of fundamental bureaucratic beliefs and provides experimental evidence on the possibility of ‘evidence briefings’ sent by senior members of the hierarchy improving that accuracy. The errors of public officials are large, with over 50 percent of officials making errors that are at least 50 percent of objective benchmark data. Officials at organizations at the lowest tier of government hierarchy make errors that are a third of a standard deviation smaller than those made by officials at higher-tier organizations. The provision of evidence briefings reduces errors by a quarter of a standard deviation, implying evidence can play a substantial role in influencing the accuracy of bureaucratic beliefs relative to organizational design.