Delegation in decision-making : who gets the power ?

Abstract

Power is a fascinating phenomenon. While this is something different than money, somehow I always had the feeling that economic sciences could provide useful tools to facilitate its understanding. In what follows, I tried to provide some - necessarily modest - contributions to its analysis, focusing mainly on how the delegation of decision-making often required by the complexity of our societies can make the true distribution of power differ from the apparent one. In the first chapter I try to understand why public institutions or government agencies often end up being given large room of maneuver regarding the definition of the missions that they will carry out on behalf of their constituencies / something we can realize by noticing how many institutions are typically doing things which have nothing to do anymore with the reasons for which they were initially set up. The second chapter, the result of a collaboration with José-Maria Alonso-Meijide, is focused on a similar kind of delegation problem, but restricted to cases where the delegation has to comply with some voting scheme, like in a democratic assemble. The third chapter , also the result of a collaboration, this time with Agnès Benassy-Quéré, investigates what kind of delegation could best serve the power of the European Union within the International Monetary Fund. The issue there is not anymore theoretical, as it has been under intense discussions within and outside the EU over many years.