Standard models of hierarchy assume that agents and middle managers are better informed than principals. We estimate the value of the informational advantage held by supervisors—middle managers—when ministerial leadership—the principal—introduced a new monitoring technology aimed at improving the performance of agricultural extension agents (AEAs) in rural Paraguay. Our approach employs a novel experimental design that elicited treatment‐priority rankings from supervisors before randomization of treatment. We find that supervisors have valuable information—they prioritize AEAs who would be more responsive to the monitoring treatment. We develop a model of monitoring under different scales of treatment roll‐out and different treatment allocation rules. We semiparametrically estimate marginal treatment effects (MTEs) to demonstrate that the value of information and the benefits to decentralizing treatment decisions depend crucially on the sophistication of the principal and on the scale of roll‐out.

中文翻译：

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信息技术与政府权力下放：巴拉圭的实验证据

层次结构的标准模型假设代理商和中层管理人员比委托人有更好的信息。当部长级领导（校长）引入一种新的监控技术，旨在改善巴拉圭农村地区农业推广人员的绩效时，我们估计了主管（中层管理人员）所拥有的信息优势的价值。我们的方法采用了一种新颖的实验设计，可以在随机分配治疗之前从主管那里获得治疗优先级的排名。我们发现主管拥有有价值的信息，他们将AEA置于优先位置，而AEA会对监控处理更加敏感。我们建立了在不同规模的治疗推广和不同的治疗分配规则下的监测模型。