Research

“Voters don’t want more government… But they don’t want less government either. They want better government and less expensive government.” —Osborne, 1992

“A fundamental rethinking is currently under way throughout the world regarding how to cope with public problems. … [G]overnments from the United States and Canada to Malaysia and New Zealand are being challenged to be reinvented, downsized, privatized, devolved, decentralized, deregulated, delayered, subjected to performance tests, and contracted out” —Salamon, 2002

“Because every citizen is required to make countless important decisions, it may seem obvious that, as a society, we should be concerned with the way these decisions are made.” —Halpern, 2003

The perceptions of dissatisfaction with the performance of public-sector institutions and growing demand for better results from government activities have stimulated numerous public management reform efforts both in the U.S. and across the globe. The quest for “a government that works better, costs less” has brought many government reform strategies, such as reliance on third-party service delivery, market competition, internet technologies, and other promising forms of public action. The last few decades of scholarship and practice have especially seen a consistently increasing interest in such ideas as funding outcomes rather than inputs, accountability based on performance, decision architecture, and data/analytics-driven decision making.

As a public management and policy scholar, I draw my inspiration from those ideas to conduct cross-disciplinary research that broadly focuses on performance of public and private nonprofit institutions. In particular, I look to understand how information, measurement, and critical thinking can improve individual and organizations decision making, social outcomes, and democratic governance. In my dissertation research, for instance, I examine how performance report cards reduce information asymmetry between third-sector organizations and their funders and how they respond to the publicly available performance information.