By Jessica McCann
Welcome to Working Papers of the Week! In this series, we'll be highlighting the research Kennedy School faculty members are doing here and abroad by featuring new working papers recently uploaded to our Faculty Papers and Publications collection.
This week, the following working papers were posted:
Simultaneous Pursuit of Discovery and Invention in the US Department of Energy
Goldstein, Anna P., and Venkatesh Narayanamurti
The division of “basic” and “applied” research is embedded in federal R&D policy, exemplified by the separation of science and technology in the organizational structure of the US Department of Energy (DOE). In this work, we consider a branch of DOE that shows potential to operate across this boundary: the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E). We construct a novel dataset of nearly 4,000 extramural financial awards given by DOE from 2010 to 2015, primarily to businesses and universities. We collect the early knowledge outputs of these awards from Web of Science and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Compared to similar awards from other parts of DOE, ARPA-E awards are more likely to jointly produce both a publication and a patent, with at least 5 times higher odds. ARPA-E awards have been productive in creating new technology, without a detrimental effect on the production of new scientific knowledge. This observation suggests the unity of research activities which are often considered separate: that which produces discoveries and that which produces inventions.
Click here for the full paper.
Recursive Representation in the Representative System
Recursive Representation in the Representative System
Mansbridge, Jane
In recursive representation both representatives and constituents take in what the other is saying, update, revise, and respond on the basis of their own experience, then listen to the others’ response to their responses and respond to that accordingly. Recursive representation should replace or at least supplement the traditional norm of “two-way communication” as a component of the larger ideal of good political representation across the representative system. The ideal is aspirational (“regulative”) and may in many actual instances have prohibitive costs, but it can serve as a standard toward which to aspire. Currently the most active and affluent donors in democracies have access to recursive representation even at the national scale, as do some constituents at local levels. Even on the scale of a large nation-state, some currently available mechanisms make it feasible to approach this ideal more fully with average and even relatively marginal constituents. Recursive representation serves as an aspirational ideal in the arenas of administrative and societal representation as well as the arena of legislative/electoral representation.
Click here for the full paper.
Can Public Reporting Cure Healthcare? The Role of Quality Transparency in Improving Patient-Provider Alignment
Saghafian, Soroush, and Wallace J. Hopp
Increasing quality transparency is widely regarded as a strong mechanism for improving the alignment between patient choices and provider capabilities, and thus, is widely pursued by policymakers as an option for improving the healthcare system. We study the effect of increasing quality transparency on patient choices, hospital investments, societal outcomes (e.g., patients’ social welfare and inequality), and the healthcare market structure (e.g., medical or geographical specialization). We also examine potential reasons behind the failure of previous public reporting efforts, and use our analysis to identify ways in which such efforts can become more effective in the future. Our analytical and numerical results calibrated with data reveal that increasing quality transparency promotes increased medical specialization, decreased geographical specialization, and induces hospitals to invest in their strength rather than their weakness. Furthermore, increasing quality transparency in the short-term typically improves the social welfare as well as the inequality among patients. In the long-term, however, we find that increasing transparency can decrease social welfare, and even a fully transparent system may not yield socially optimal outcomes. Hence, a policymaker concerned with societal outcomes needs to accompany increasing quality transparency with other policies that correct the allocation of patients to hospitals. Among such policies, we find that policies that incentivize hospitals are usually more effective than policies that incentivize patients. Finally, our results indicate that, to achieve maximal benefits from increasing quality transparency, policymakers should target younger, more affluent, or urban (i.e., high hospital density area) patients, or those with diseases that can be deferred.
Click here for the full paper.
To see other recent faculty research, check out the full publications collection or follow @HKS_Research on Twitter.
