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MayInfluence Activities and Bureaucratic Performance:
Experimental Evidence from China
Speaker: ZHANG Qiong, School of Public Administration and Policy, RUC
Moderator: LIU Ruiming, National Academy of Development and Strategy, RUC
Time: June 5, 2019 (Wednesday) 14:00-15:30
Venue: Meeting Room 815, Chongde Building West Wing (Keyan Building Block A）
Abstract: Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to senior leadership could cause influence activities: Agents might devote much efforts to please their supervisors, rather than focusing on productive tasks that benefit their organizations. We conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment among Chinese grassroots state employees and provide the first rigorous empirical evidence on the existence and implications of influence activities. We find that state employees are able to impose evaluator-specific influence to affect evaluation outcomes, and this process could be partly observed by their co-workers. Furthermore, introducing uncertainty in the identity of the evaluator, which discourages evaluator-specific influence activities, can significantly improve the work performance of state employees.
Speaker Profile: ZHANG Qiong, Associate Professor and doctorate supervisor at School of Public Administration and Policy, RUC. She received her Bachelor degree of Economics in Peking University in 2005 and PhD. of Economics in Tsinghua University. ZHANG taught at School of Economics of Central University of Finance and Economics from 2011 to 2016. Her main research interests include demography, labor and public policy evaluation. Her research findings are published in international and domestic journals such as Economic Research, World Economy, Financial Research, Population Studies, China Economic Review and Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy.