Performance-based incentives in public sector services / Vanitha Virudachalam.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Virudachalam, Vanitha, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Department of Operations and Information Management, degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Operations research.

Business administration.

Educational evaluation.

Public administration.

Health care management.

Public policy.

Operations and information management--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--Operations and information management.

Local Subjects:

Operations research.

Business administration.

Educational evaluation.

Public administration.

Health care management.

Public policy.

Operations and information management--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--Operations and information management.

Genre:

Academic theses.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (229 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 82-04B.

Place of Publication:

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] : University of Pennsylvania ; Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2020.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

This dissertation studies the role of performance-based incentives in public sector service operations. In particular, we consider incentives in the context of K-12 education and healthcare. These systems share three key characteristics: the quality of service provision depends both on the efforts of the service provider and customer, the provider is paid by a third-party, and measuring the quality of service provision is difficult. In three chapters, we study different facets of the incentive problem. In the first chapter, we consider the problem faced by school districts seeking to maximize student performance, as measured by annual state exams. Using a dynamic two-period principal-agent model, we study the interaction between two levers that the school district can use to improve performance: a midyear "interim assessment," which will more accurately gauge whether students are on track to perform well, and performance-based incentives for teachers. We show that investing in an interim assessment is beneficial in only a limited number of scenarios; our results suggest that the growing dependence on third-party assessments may be misplaced. In the second chapter, we turn to healthcare. We study the problem faced by a profit-maximizing, resource-constrained hospital that controls patient inflows by designing a case- mix of its elective procedures and patient outflows via patient discharges. We consider a hospital that makes these decisions in the presence of bundled payments, which implicitly penalize high readmission rates. In our analysis, we focus on assessing the benefits associated with the hospital employing a coordinated decision-making process, in which both portfolio and discharge decisions are made in tandem. We compare a coordinated decision-making structure to two commonly utilized decision-making structures and characterize when the hospital can most benefit from coordination. Finally, in the third chapter, we return to K-12 education. We study the impact of coproduction on the student performance in the presence of merit-based rewards for both teachers and students, using a Cobb-Douglas formulation of the education production function and a Stackelberg model of teachers' and students' effort decisions. We characterize students' and teachers' optimal effort levels for a given reward allocation, and we illustrate the impact on student performance.

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-04, Section: B.

Advisors: Savin, Sergei; Committee members: Serguei Netessine; Xuanming Su.

Department: Operations and Information Management.

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2020.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798672163772

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.