The Delegation Dilemma: Economies of Scale, Accountability, and Polycentric Governance
Many collective-action systems are neither fully decentralized nor fully centralized: agents voluntarily organize into institutions that share organizational costs and delegate decisions to representatives. Delegation can reduce individual costs, but it also transfers control to representatives whose private objectives need not align with those of their constituents. We study this tension in a repeated game with endogenous delegation to self-interested centers. A simple reduced-form model yields a scale--accountability tradeoff: larger constituencies offer greater cost-sharing benefits to members, yet the marginal value to a center of retaining any one constituent decreases as group size ...
| Authors | Arin Mukhopadhyay, Aris Filos-Ratsikas, Panayiotis Danassis |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MA |
| Published | 15 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
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