While existing research has suggested that delegating foreign aid allocation decisions to a multilateral aid fund may incentivize recipient countries to invest in bureaucratic quality, our analysis links the fund’s decision rules to recipient-country investment by explicitly modeling the decision-making within multilateral aid funds. We find that majority rule induces stronger competition between recipients, resulting in higher investments in bureaucratic quality. Despite this advantage, unanimity can still be optimal since the increased investment under majority comes at the cost of low aid allocation to countries in the minority. The qualitative predictions of our model rationalize our novel empirical finding that, relative to organizations that use a consensus rule, organizations that use majority are more responsive to changes in recipient-country quality.

现有研究表明，将外国援助分配决策委托给多边援助基金可能会激励受援国投资于官僚主义素质，但我们的分析通过明确建模多边援助基金内的决策将基金的决策规则与受援国投资联系起来。我们发现，多数制规则会导致接受者之间更强的竞争，从而导致对官僚主义素质的投资增加。尽管有这一优势，但由于多数人投资的增加是以对少数人国家的低援助分配为代价的，因此一致仍然是最佳的。我们模型的定性预测合理化了我们的新的经验发现，相对于使用共识规则的组织，