IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/jas/jasssj/2012-63-2.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Policy Innovation, Decentralised Experimentation, and Laboratory Federalism

Author

Abstract

Decentralised experimentation and mutual learning of public policies is seen as one of the important advantages of federal systems (Oates: laboratory federalism). Based upon Hayekian ideas of the advantages of decentralised experimentation (as a discovery procedure), we analyse the long-term benefits of parallel experimentation in a federal system from an evolutionary economics perspective. We present a simulation model in which the lower-level jurisdictions in a federal system experiment with randomly chosen policy innovations and can imitate the relatively best solutions. The simulations confirm our hypotheses that a higher degree of decentralisation has positive effects on the long-term accumulation of knowledge of suitable policy solutions and also limits risks through better protection against erroneous policies. Also problems of policy learning and trade offs with (static and dynamic) advantages of centralisation are taken into account.

Suggested Citation

  • Nicole J. Saam & Wolfgang Kerber, 2013. "Policy Innovation, Decentralised Experimentation, and Laboratory Federalism," Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, vol. 16(1), pages 1-7.
    • Handle: RePEc:jas:jasssj:2012-63-2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.jasss.org/16/1/7/7.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nicola Lettieri, 2016. "Computational Social Science, the Evolution of Policy Design and Rule Making in Smart Societies," Future Internet, MDPI, vol. 8(2), pages 1-17, May.
    2. Ansell, Christopher K. & Bartenberger, Martin, 2016. "Varieties of experimentalism," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 64-73.
    3. Trent J. MacDonald, 2019. "The Political Economy of Non-Territorial Exit," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 18871.
    4. Hefeker, Carsten & Neugart, Michael, 2018. "Non-cooperative and cooperative policy reforms under uncertainty and spillovers," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 94-102.
    5. ., 2019. "Economic theory of non-territorial unbundling," Chapters, in: The Political Economy of Non-Territorial Exit, chapter 1, pages 14-38, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    6. Josip Stepanic & Mirjana Pejic Bach & Josip Kasac, 2013. "Agent Based Model of Young Researchers in Higher Education Institutions," Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems - scientific journal, Croatian Interdisciplinary Society Provider Homepage: http://indecs.eu, vol. 11(2), pages 209-216.
    7. Becker, Lasse & Bizer, Kilian, 2015. "Federalism and innovation support for small and medium-sized enterprises: Empirical evidence in Europe," University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics 245, University of Goettingen, Department of Economics.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jas:jasssj:2012-63-2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Francesco Renzini (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.