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1、Chapter 7How Agents MatterDarren Hawkins and Wade Jacoby* The authors are from Brigham Young University. They thank David Lake, Daniel Nielson, Michael Tierney, Andrew Cortell, Lisa Martin, Rachel Cichowski, Karen Alter, Jay Goodliffe, Mark Pollack, Kelly Patterson, Scott Cooper, Jon Pevehouse, Rach
2、el Epstein, and many others who commented during a series of presentations. Camille Jackson and Anna Sanders provided invaluable research assistance.In spite of the growing sophistication of the principal-agent (PA) literature, it still contains a remarkably thin view of agent behavior. That is, PA
3、theorists have made surprisingly few direct claims about agents. Almost twenty years after it was written, Williamsons (1985, 30) pithy formulation - that agents are “self-interest seeking with guile” - remains the classic statement, and most current formulations do not go far beyond it. For example
4、, Bergman, Mller, and Strm (2000, 257) note that “delegation is often problematic. Agents may have different interests from their principalsand/or the principal may be unable to observe the agents actions on his behalf”. Mainly, the field has focused on what principals can do to control such agents.
5、 These controls - including detailed rules, screening and selection, monitoring and reporting requirements, institutional checks, and sanctions, as detailed in the Introduction - give us an indirect picture of agents as seen through the eyes of principals. While the indirect picture reinforces Willi
6、amsons original notion of potentially troublesome agents, it also suggests that principals have many tools to control these agents.Scholars have paid less attention to the strategies that agents use to try to circumvent these controls. Agents often do more than just attempt to hide their information
7、 and their actions, as discussed in the Introduction. In fact, as we discuss below, some agent strategies are not very hidden at all. Other strategies are indeed hidden, but agents use different methods to cover their tracks. Though scholars have made great efforts to articulate and describe a range
8、 of principal control strategies, as summarized in the Introduction, a parallel effort needs to be made to understand agent strategies. Moreover, a focus on principal control mechanisms privileges the ways in which principals design the contract governing agent behavior, essentially directing attent
9、ion to moments of institutional creation. What happens between the creation moment and subsequent outcomes can depend on agent behavior and strategies. Of course principals can later recontract, yet such recontracting is often quite difficult due to collective action problems among principals (Niels
10、on and Tierney 2003a). If scholars are to successfully analyze the interaction between principals and agents, they need to understand agents in greater detail. Other chapters in this volume identify agent characteristics as important explanatory factors - heterogeneity of preferences for Thompson, p
11、rofessional versus political staffing for Cortell and Peterson, and the particular nature of international courts for Alter - while we focus on agent strategies.Our central point is that principal preferences and control mechanisms alone cannot fully explain which agents principals end up hiring or
12、how those agents act once hired. More specifically, independent agent strategies can influence a principals decision to delegate and the agents level of autonomy. Theorists who see agents as simply trying to hide information and action are likely to miss important strategic interactions that alter P
13、A outcomes. Our arguments are relevant not only to the PA approach but also to broad theoretical debates about international institutions. Much of the institutionalist literature is focused on theorizing state preferences and design of IOs (Abbott and Snidal 2000; Koremenos, Lipson, and Snidal 2001)
14、. We focus theoretical attention on IOs as strategic actors with agency. IOs matter not only because states have designed rules to resolve problems, but because those IOs are themselves independent actors that interact strategically with states and others. While few might disagree with this contenti
15、on, scholars have not yet - with a few exceptions (Barnett and Finnemore 1999 and 2004) - theorized the strategies of those actors and how they influence international outcomes. We share with Barnett and Finnemore (2004) a concern with taking IOs seriously as agents. Unlike those authors we focus no
16、t on the social knowledge that endows IOs with authority (and that takes them beyond a principal-agent approach) but rather on the particular strategies that IOs pursue in their relationship with states.Most of us know intuitively that agent strategies differ, and popular culture constantly reminds
17、us. Forrest Gump is the perfect agent because he always does exactly what he is told with total commitment (and surprising competence). When his drill sergeant asks Forrest what he thinks, Forrest shouts, “Whatever you tell me to think, sir!” To the sergeant, Forrest is a “!%! genius.” To us, Forres
18、t is an agent who has no strategies that would trouble his principal. But Forrest is unusual. Much more common are what we might call the George Castanza agent. Like his Seinfeld namesake, this agent is shiftless, marginally competent, and always on the take. Screening and selection having already f
19、ailed, close monitoring of this agent is a must. Principals do get some work out of this kind of agent - otherwise they would terminate the contract - but its always a close call on whether the costs outweigh the benefits. PA theorists hardly expect to find many Forrest Gump agents - though like the
20、 sergeant, they know how to appreciate them when they see them - but they often describe George Costanza agents, with whom the principal is never satisfied, but also not quite ready to abandon. More neglected in PA analysis is the kind of agent exemplified by the Man with No Name, made famous by Cli
21、nt Eastwood. In High Plains Drifter, the Man With No Name is hired by a towns leading citizens to protect them against the outlaws who terrorize them. In A Fistful of Dollars, he is hired by each of two warring families to help in their fight against the other. Whether splitting principals (the town
22、 fathers) or playing them off against one another (the two families), this agent is a nightmare: he hides the way his preferences diverge from those of his principals, he waits for moments of maximum principal vulnerability to clarify contract terms, he embraces all the autonomy granted by the princ
23、ipals, and then uses his power to take more. Self interested with guile, indeed. The point of the analogy is not to supplant negative stereotypes of IO officials as feckless and incompetent with equally cartoonish pictures of them as ruthless and deceptive. The point is that agent strategies vary gr
24、eatly and are likely to have some influence on outcomes. Scholars may know this intuitively, but consideration of that variation has played little role in either PA or international institutions theory to date. Agent strategies are likely to influence both principal delegation decisions and agent au
25、tonomy, and we adopt the Introductions definition of both concepts. We argue that agent strategies can entice potential principals into delegating authority and then often increase the agents own autonomy once that authority has been delegated. While a whole range of agent strategies are worthy of e
26、xamination, we focus on four: interpreting principal mandates and other rules prior to delegation, reinterpreting those rules once states have delegated, expanding permeability (to non-principal third parties) and buffering (creating barriers to principal monitoring of agents). Our point is not that
27、 principals are too dumb to anticipate these strategies and to devise counter-strategies. Rather, given that all controls impose costs on the principals who use them and that as a result principals may not employ control mechanisms vigorously, we wish to identify the strategies that agents use to ex
28、ploit these difficulties in order to to secure delegated authority and to increase autonomy.For every endogenous aspect of the contract designed by principals, we stress an exogenous complement that can result from agent strategies. All principals propose a mandate and a set of rules for agent behav
29、ior. As we show below, however, potential agents do not always wait patiently for principal delegation but seek to convince principals through principal-friendly interpretations that they will be excellent agents. On the other hand, once principals delegate more authority, agents can openly attempt
30、to reinterpret these mandates and rules in ways that increase their autonomy. Similarly, principal monitoring through agent communication is a normal, endogenous part of most agency contracts. Yet agents can develop strategies to buffer such monitoring, sometimes by creating fairly elaborate organiz
31、ational structures to raise the monitoring costs. Finally, principals and agents exist in a broader political context, and principals may well allow agents to be permeable to certain third parties that can influence agent decision-making (Gould 2003). Since permeability is a potential aid to princip
32、als - through the well-known mechanism of “fire alarms” (McCubbins and Schwartz 1984), it is often endogenous to the agent contract. But agent strategies can also increase permeability in ways that let them serve third parties rather than principals. The paper has three sections plus a conclusion. F
33、irst, we specify the scope conditions under which agent strategies will matter most. In the second section, we analyze the ways in which agent strategies may affect both delegation and autonomy. Finally, we offer a case study of the European Convention on Human Rights. We show that the European Huma
34、n Rights Commission and Court first helped convince states to delegate to them and then used three distinct strategies to gain greater autonomy. When Do Strategies Matter? Agency Costs and Pool Size as Scope ConditionsFor agent strategies to matter, agents need leverage. In particular, the costs of
35、creating new agents must be high compared to the costs of delegating to existing agents, and the pool of existing agents must be limited (see Table 1). On the high costs of creating new agents, see Keohane 1984 and Weber 1994. This argument underpins all of the subsequent analysis and sets scope con
36、ditions on the arguments to come. Where the cost of creating new agents is low or where the agent pool is large, agent characteristics and strategies are less likely to matter.table 1 near herePrincipals incur two types of costs in creating new agents: contracting costs and uncertainty costs. Contra
37、cting costs include the time and resources required to negotiate with other potential principals and to set up new agents and new control mechanisms. Although states delegating to existing agents must also pay contracting costs, we assume these are typically lower than for new agents. Principals tha
38、t create new agents must negotiate fundamental agent characteristics, decision rules, funding methods, broad competencies, and decision-making structures. Such features are already established for existing agents so that contracting costs are limited to negotiations over the task at hand. Additional
39、ly, principals often minimize these costs by writing rules at the moment of agent creation about how new delegation should proceed (Gruber 2000).Uncertainty costs multiply these contracting costs for new agents. When creating new agents, principals are uncertain about whether those agents will opera
40、te in practice as they do on paper, whether the control mechanisms will work, whether other principals might have hidden agendas in agent creation, and whether and how the prospective agent will benefit the principal. With existing agents, principals have more information about the agents preference
41、s and abilities, as well as the nature of the political interaction among principals or between principals and agents. As a result, principals have higher confidence in the predicted outcomes and - provided their preferences are sufficiently aligned - are more likely to delegate due to the lower ris
42、ks. Where the cost of creating new agents is relatively high, a limited pool of existing agents further increases the importance of agent characteristics and strategies. Where agent pools are large, screening and selection can work well as a control mechanism. As pools diminish in size, however, scr
43、eening and selection become increasingly irrelevant, and the characteristics of existing agents loom increasingly large. In both international and domestic politics, the number of available institutional agents is generally quite small; only a few bureaucracies or IOs with the needed expertise are a
44、vailable for any given problem, and principals often lean on existing agents to take on new tasks. Small pool size can also adversely affect other control mechanisms. Sanctions, for example, are less effective when agents know that principals have few other options. Endless U.S. delays in U.N. budge
45、t payments would undoubtedly have been more effective in bringing reform if the United States could credibly threaten to use its money to employ other agents. The U.N. monopoly in so many issue areas makes its existing characteristics both more important and more difficult to change. Moreover, agent
46、 strategies are likely to matter more in politics than in economics because the typical agent output is public policy, which is usually a monopoly good and rarely priced. We thank David Lake for helping us make this point. This makes it difficult or impossible for principals to compare alternative p
47、roviders and measure efficiency.Our argument so far suggests that limited agent pools can make agent characteristics and strategies more important to PA outcomes. This position echoes an early sympathetic critique of PA theories, which observed that political bureaucracies are likely to be more diff
48、icult to control than economic agents and that political contexts work differently than economic ones (Moe 1984). Few have followed up this insight, despite the fact that a fair number of empirical studies have now shown that many political agents have more autonomy and slack than standard PA theori
49、es would suggest (Eisner and Meier 1990; Hill and Weissert 1995; Krause 1996; Rourke 1976; Wood 1988). Our approach also resonates with sociological approaches to organizational behavior, which have long emphasized the important role that organizational structure can have on political outcomes (Perrow 1986; Pierson 1996; DiMaggio and Powell 1991a; Barnett and Finnemore 1999).How Agent Strategies Influence Delegation and AutonomyScholars in both PA and international institutionalist traditions have foc