Governance preferences influence how public officials process performance data about service providers. Based on motivated reasoning theory, we examine the extent to which local delivery preferences—preferences for contracting with local service providers over contracting with non-local ones—influence public managers' and politicians' interpretation of performance data. We firstly expect public officials to misinterpret evidence that contradicts their local delivery preferences and we, secondly, hypothesize that politicians are more prone to biases than public managers are. We test these hypotheses by conducting a randomized survey experiment among 4,000 public officials in Belgium. The results indicate that public officials tend to show a bias for local providers, but not for non-local providers. Yet, we found no significant differences between politicians and public managers. Our study provides new evidence about the influence of governance preferences on the interpretation of performance information, and calls into question its effective use by politicians and public managers.

中文翻译：

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从本地供应商处购买：治理偏好在评估绩效信息中的作用

治理偏好会影响公职人员处理有关服务提供商的绩效数据的方式。基于动机推理理论，我们研究了本地交付偏好（与本地服务提供商签约而不是与非本地服务提供商签约的偏好）影响公共管理者和政治家对绩效数据的解释的程度。我们首先预计公职人员会误解与其当地交付偏好相矛盾的证据，其次，我们假设政客比公共管理人员更容易产生偏见。我们通过在比利时的 4,000 名公职人员中进行随机调查实验来检验这些假设。结果表明，公职人员倾向于偏向本地提供者，而不是非本地提供者。然而，我们发现政治家和公共管理人员之间没有显着差异。我们的研究提供了关于治理偏好对绩效信息解释的影响的新证据，并对政治家和公共管理者的有效使用提出了质疑。