Proper Incentives Research Articles

On the Invariance Result of Liability Rules in Oligopoly

Abstract In this paper, we revisit the invariance result of liability rules established by Polinsky (1980. “Strict Liability vs. Negligence in a Market Setting.” The American Economic Review 70: 363–7) and Shavell (1980. “Strict Liability Versus Negligence.” Journal of Legal Studies 9: 1–25) in oligopoly. We show that in the case of linear demand functions, symmetric duopoly firms produce less than the efficient quantity levels under all of the no liability rule, the strict liability rule and the negligence rule but they take the efficient level of care under the strict liability rule and the negligence rule whereas they take no care under no liability rule. Thus, the invariance result does not hold in the case of duopoly. So, contrary to the invariance result, our result has an important implication that the liability rule in addition to the price plays a crucial role in providing a proper incentive to duopoly firms. Instead, we establish a weaker version of invariance result between the strict liability rule and the negligence rule in oligopoly with general demand functions.

Impact of Salary and Recognition on Job Performance: A study of Nangarhar University Lecturers, Afghanistan

Organizations seek to gain a competitive advantage by applying different strategies in today’s competitive environment. Due to intense competitive pressure, organizations attempt to gain a competitive advantage using employee skills, abilities, and expertise. Organizations offer different kinds of incentives, like salary and recognition, to ensure proper utilization and increase employee performance. Satisfied employees become more dedicated, committed, and loyal to organizations than other employees without a proper incentive system. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of salary and recognition on the job performance of university lecturers at Nangarhar University, Afghanistan. The questionnaire method was adopted to collect data using Likert scales ranging from 1 to 5. Data were collected from 210 respondents and analyzed using SPSS version 27. The Pearson product-moment correlation was applied to determine the impact of salary and recognition on job performance. The result of the study showed that there is a significant correlation between salary and employee performance. In addition, it was also found that there was a significant correlation between recognition and employee performance.

Fairness mechanism and stackelberg strategy for multi-agent systems: A case study of legends of the three kingdoms

Alongside the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technologies, the complexity of society continues to escalate, and the design of multi-agent system rules becomes increasingly crucial, optimize participant engagement and addressing the issue of fairness and equilibrium win rates. The card game Legends of the Three Kingdoms (LTK), as a complex multi-agent system, represents an important abstraction of real-world scenarios, requiring the implementation of proper incentive mechanisms. Based on the mechanism and Stackelberg, this paper optimizes player strategies and system fairness. Firstly, we constructed a multi-agent Stackelberg game model for team battles. Then, we analyzed the impact of decision-making factors on players. Subsequently, we defined three kinds of fairness and improved the incentive mechanism. The results indicate that our mechanism optimizes participants' game behaviors, enhancing fairness among team players. Win rates were improved from 56.2% VS 43.8% to 51.4% VS 48.6%. With three different fairness measures, the win percentage fairness increased by 72 %, and the first elimination fairness increased by about 79 %. Our research provides a reference for understanding and analyzing complex computational models and facilitates the resolution of various resource allocation and system design issues.

ATTRACTING PRIVATE INVESTMENT IN PUBLIC-PRIVATE-PARTNERSHIP: TAX REDUCTION OR RISK SHARING

With the financial burden of government increasing, the Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model has become an alternative method to develop public infrastructure. To efficiently promote the private sector to participate in PPP, making a proper incentive policy is critical for the government. This paper examined the effects of two governmental support policies, i.e., tax reduction and risk-sharing, on the investment decision of the private sector, and further compared the relative efficacy of these two policies. The results manifest that: first, both tax reduction and risk-sharing policies motivate private sector to invest earlier; second, although the capital structure decision of the private sector is free from the influence of the risk-sharing policy, the optimal debt level under tax reduction policy shows a U-shape relationship with the incentive ratio; third, when completion risk is large, there exists efficiency loss for total benefits of the project under the risk-sharing incentive policy. Besides, the efficacy of two incentive policies varies depending on the scenario. Firstly, given the same incentive ratio, the risk-sharing policy proves to be more effective than the tax reduction policy. Secondly, when considering the same level of incentive loss for government, tax reduction policy outperforms than risk-sharing policy in terms of efficacy. Thirdly, the efficacy of these policies also depends on the completion risk level: under small completion risk, risk-sharing policy is more effective, whereas under large completion risk, the tax reduction policy takes precedence. Based on these findings, some managerial insights that could assist government in formulating more effective incentive policies are proposed.

Waste solar panel generation in Viet Nam: waste estimation and management orientation

Solar energy has emerged as a prominent solution to address the rising energy needs of expanding populations and combat climate change. While the advancement and proliferation of solar photovoltaics have significantly contributed to the decarbonization of energy systems, the improper disposal of end-of-life solar panels could potentially result in significant environmental impacts. Moreover, lack of or inadequate information on the quantity of the obsolete solar panels and their related environmental impacts, as well as proper incentives, and regulatory policies on waste solar panel management are major hinderances for the safe disposal of waste solar panels their materials. In this case study, surveys at solar panel manufacturers, solar power plants and rooftop solar systems have been conducted. The collected information and data are then used to derive solar panel’s lifespan and estimate the amount of waste solar panel till 2050. It is estimated that the cumulative amount of waste solar panel generated in 2022 is about 148 thousand tonnes and is projected to increase to 1.7 million tonnes by 2050. Based on that, sound management solutions toward circular economy have been proposed to properly manage waste solar panel in Vietnam.

Government innovation management: challenges and opportunities

PurposeThis paper aims to identifying challenges faced by innovation in the public sector of Jordan.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative method was adopted for achieving the study objective with the undertaking of thematic analysis upon the answers of respondents in relation to the challenges for innovation within the public sector of Jordan. There were 25 semi-structured interviews conducted with organizational development managers, innovation assessors working within the public sector and other experts.FindingsThe aspect of the government innovation concept that is most important is the creation of added value, and also that innovation is a process that is individual rather than one that is institutional. Leaders or managers and the employees are considered as primary sources for the innovation in government. On the basis of the analysis of the data within the study, it was concluded that the challenges faced by innovation management within the public sector of Jordan can be considered as being a lack of a culture that is supportive of innovation, a lack of vision for innovation, a lack of institutionalization, a lack of an innovation plan at the national level, a general lack of awareness, the bureaucracy and the rigidity of the organizational structures, the excessive routine, the lack of rewards and incentives, the lack of training, the lack of financial resources and, finally, the silo effect. Several recommendations are provided by the study for improving the reality for government innovation including the building of organizational culture for supporting innovation, the activation of open communication, the development and training of employees and the provision of proper incentives for them.Originality/valueA conceptual model has been put forward by the study that may be employed in the assessment of challenges faced by managers when seeking to implement innovation management within institutions in the public sector. The study can also benefit both decision makers and practitioners and the makers of public policy within the public administration of Jordan, especially in relation to government innovation through the identification of all the challenges faced by innovation management in Jordanian public sector, and the provision of useful strategies and mechanisms that can help in the mitigation of those challenges and the improvement of innovation management levels in Jordanian government. Further, the study results can act as a catalyst for the issuing of annual innovation reports within the government sector of Jordan.

Unlocking the potential of rooftop solar panels: An incentive rate structure design

With the continuous maturity of distributed generation technology, rooftop solar panels have come to play an increasingly critical role in the construction of future energy systems. However, there remains an open question as to how to design adequate rate structure and provide proper incentives for distributed solar production. In this paper, we propose an incentive rate structure for rooftop solar panels to fairly unlock the potential of such distributed energy resources. The interaction of residential consumers and utilities is formulated as a tri-level optimization model to evaluate the impact of the rate structure design on the welfare transfer and investment behavior of residential consumers. An incentive rate structure is designed in which the supply-side effects of rooftop solar panel investment are considered by explicitly modeling wholesale market dynamics. Contrary to conventional belief, we indicate that the integration of rooftop solar panels can increase the expected profits of the utility company in some usual cases. Case studies demonstrate that through adequate rate structure design, the market operator can achieve the established social goals while balancing the welfare transfer effect among different market entities. Hopefully, our work can provide novel insights and a theoretical reference for the relevant policy design.

“Laboratory nationalism”: Policy innovation in China

The central government and local governments in China constitute “laboratory nationalism”, which is different from “laboratory federalism”. As a planner, the central government first organizes small-scale policy trials, then imitates the successful policies on a larger scale. To illustrate the process, we take the gradual regional opening as a typical case, then develop a two-stage “trial-extension” game model incorporating the central government and two local governments. Laboratory nationalism's domination depends on actions of the central government at two stages: (1) offering proper incentives to the eligible district at the beginning; (2) in the end unifying local policies to the one which has proven to be successful. We demonstrate that under certain conditions, laboratory nationalism can improve on decentralized outcome.

Beyond Ostrom: Randomized experiment of the impact of individualized tree rights on forest management in Ethiopia

We argue that while community forest management is effective in protecting forest resources, as argued by Ostrom, such management may fail to provide the proper incentives to nurture such resources because the benefits of forest management are collectively shared. This study proposes a mixed private and community management system characterized by communal protection of community-owned forest areas and individual management of individually owned trees as a desirable arrangement for timber forest management in developing countries. By conducting a randomized experiment in Ethiopia, we found that the mixed management system significantly stimulated intensive forest management activities, including pruning, guarding, and watering. Furthermore, more timber trees and forest products were extracted from the treated areas, which are byproducts of tree management (e.g., thinned trees and pruned branches). In contrast, the extracted volumes of non-timber forest products unrelated to tree management (fodder and honey) did not change with the intervention.

Coping with Spatial Unfairness and Overloading Problem in Mobile Networks via D2D Relaying

Device-to-device (D2D) relaying is able to increase the network capacity, enhance the network coverage, or mitigate the interference to legacy cellular transmissions. These benefits are even emphasized if a proper incentives are offered to the users to motivate them to act as relays. We first survey the stateof- the-art incentives to show that despite a proper incentivization, the benefits from relaying are enjoyed typically only by the users directly involved in relaying, i.e., either those in favorable locations to act as relays or those exploiting such relays to improve their performance. Nevertheless, many users, who are not satisfied with their quality of service (QoS), may not profit from D2D relaying due to their unfavorable locations. Besides, the current incentive mechanisms are not able to alleviate the overloading of the base station (BS) without violating QoS of already admitted users. Thus, to cope with the spatial unfairness and the overloading of BSs, we propose resource allocation framework extending D2D relaying benefits also to the users not directly involved in the relaying process. The proposed framework enables efficient reuse of radio resources and takes inspiration from economy concept of taxes. Moreover, it gives an opportunity to the users distributing spared radio resources to increase their virtual monetary gain, reputation, or even helping other users depending on mutual social relationships. The simulations demonstrate that the proposed concept improves the ratio of satisfied users and/or maximizes the number of newly admitted users for which the BS would not have radio resources otherwise.

НЕЗАКРЫТЫЕ ВОПРОСЫ ПО НЕКЛАССИЧЕСКОЙ ЛОГИКЕ (ПАМЯТИ ПРОФЕССОРА Д. В. ПИВОВАРОВА)

As a methodological tool of sorts in the memorial paper makes use of reconstruction of professor Pivovarov’s talks, which often displayed genuine, persevering and always critical interest in non-classical logic. The questions at hand are the question of scientific status and philosophical consistency of deuniverslization of classical logic. The various types of logical systems, whose co-existence was brought about during the XX century, has become an actual phenomenon, insistently calling for a broader philosophical, scientific, and even cultural reflection on the nature of contemporary logic as a body of knowledge. Among the questions three touch upon the problem of the status of non-classical logic, considered as the part of humanities: Should non-classical logic be taken as a response to mathematical logic’s absolute «inhumanity»? Mathematization of logic is related to another crisis of the foundations of mathematics – could one imply the crisis of ultimate methodological principles of social studies and humanities to be the reason for deuniversalization of classical logic? Does non-classical logic fit the natural reasonings? Three other questions address the philosophy of logic: Does contemporary logic – whether classical or not – build upon mathematics still belong to philosophy? Is there distinctive philosophy of non-classical logic yet? Could non-classical logic still serve as the normative discipline, as the «canon of thinking»? The very character of the questions doesn’t lead to any closed, definitive answers. Be that as it may and, having the current scientific studies philosophically reflecting on the logical pluralism backing us up, we aim here at a coherent and a consistent examination of philosophical aspects and problems of non-classical logic. The examination resulted in formulating several key results: non-classical logic’s development effectively was a response to semantic and metatheoretical problems of mathematical logic, that was coming to be, but a kind of «humanistic» aspect is the fundamental non-elimination of the subject in the semantics of the corresponding intensional logics; the actuel stance is supported that various types of reasoning do not correspond to the subject of logic, but can be (and traditionally are) objects of application of various logics as intellectual tools; extrological stimulations and especially intrological resources of logical investigations affect significantly the current understanding of philosophical nature of logic; the question of alterations of ontological and epistemological premises, which underlie the various logical systems – an essential one for the philosophy of logic – is reformulated as in effect being the question of correctness and efficiency of some particular tools in the logical arsenal; logical analysis in general is to be methodologically receptive to different contexts, their specifics in order to avoid destructive conflicts, threatening to eliminate the uniqueness of said contexts. The author voices a hope, that the critical assessment of the results presented as to their being valuable and sound will make the work a proper incentive for perspective and productive discussion of diversity of logic.

Financial Advisor Compensation Structure and Client Equity Allocations

Investment advice is a difficult-to-value service and aligning incentives between financial advisors and investors is imperative. A compensation structure that pays advisors primarily through up-front commissions creates a potential short-term relationship, while a trailing commission arrangement better aligns with an intertemporal relationship. This paper explores this effect using a dataset of approximately 120,000 variable annuities from a single insurance company sold from January 1999 to December 2020. We find that clients of financial advisors who are paid higher up-front commissions have greater recent return bias compared to clients of advisors who receive higher trailing commissions. These findings indicate that a nuanced approach to compensation may be needed to balance investor protection with the proper incentives for financial advisors to provide unbiased and high-quality advice.

Asymmetric role of the informal sector on economic growth: Empirical investigation on a developing country

The role of the informal sector in economic growth still remains an issue of debate. This study contributes to resolving this by taking into account the asymmetric effect of the informal sector on economic growth. The study applies the Non-linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (N-ARDL) model to capture the asymmetric relationship between the informal sector activity and economic growth for the period 1982–2018 in Bangladesh. The estimation of the N-ARDL model reveals that the informal sector asymmetrically affects the domestic output and economic growth in Bangladesh for both the short-run and the long run. The study has observed an asymmetrically larger effect on output and economic growth from the falling contribution of the informal sector. Urbanization and capital growth also contribute to an increase in economic growth. Therefore, proper incentives and careful policy measures are suggested to effectively diminish the prevalence of informality and promote its transition towards a more formalized framework.

The Impact of Agricultural Employment and Technological Innovation on the Environment: Evidence from BRICS Nations Considering a Novel Environmental Sustainability Indicator

This study fills a gap created by previous environmental investigations by including the impact of agricultural employment and technology on the load capacity factor (LCF) rather than solely focusing on CO2 or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which only measure from the demand side; LCF provides a complete picture of environmental degradation by evaluating both the demand side and supply side. This connection is moderated further by considering the renewable energy and natural resource rent impacts. In this analysis, panel econometric methods are incorporated, including the cross-sectional dependence test. This study uses the Pooled Mean Group–Autoregressive Distributed Lag (PMG-ARDL) model to evaluate the level of effect independent factors had on the LCF of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) nations from 1992 to 2020 in the presence of a heterogeneous integration order. The estimations recognize heterogeneity in the effects of agricultural employment, renewable energy, natural resource rent, and technology on LCF, in the short run and long run. According to the empirical results, agricultural employment significantly enhances the LCF both in the short run and long run, implying that employment in agriculture improves environmental sustainability. However, increasing the use of renewable energy protects the environment from degradation only in the long run; it has no significant impact in the short run. On the contrary, natural resource rent and technology lead to a decline in environmental sustainability in the long run. Hence, this study recommends prioritizing renewable energy intake over other energies, providing proper incentives to motivate agricultural entrepreneurship to ensure a sustainable environment.

Factors associated with recommendation behaviors of four non-National Immunization Program vaccines: a cross-sectional survey among public health workers in China

BackgroundImmunization is a crucial preventive measure to safeguard children under five years old against a range of diseases. In China, the coverage rate of non-National Immunization Program (non-NIP) vaccines can be improved by leveraging the recommendation from public health workers. Hence, understanding the influencing factors of recommendation behaviors assume paramount importance. This study aims to investigate influencing factors of public health workers' recommendation behaviors towards non-NIP vaccines, with a particular emphasis on financial incentives.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted using a multi-stage sampling method in 2019 from August to October. 627 public health workers were recruited from 148 community healthcare centers in ten provincial-level administrative divisions in China. An anonymous questionnaire was used to collect demographic information, attitudes towards vaccination, and recommendation behaviors towards non-NIP vaccines, including Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccine, pneumococcal conjugate vaccine, varicella vaccine, and rotavirus vaccine. Descriptive analysis and multivariate logistic regression analysis were adopted in this study.ResultsOf the 610 public health workers with complete survey data, 53.8%, 57.4%, 84.1%, and 54.1% often recommended Hib vaccine, pneumococcal pneumonia vaccine (PCV), varicella vaccine, and rotavirus vaccine, respectively. Logistic regression revealed that gender (Hib vaccine: OR = 0.4, 95% CI: 0.2–0.8; PCV: OR = 0.4, 95% CI: 0.2–0.8; rotavirus vaccine: OR = 0.3, 95% CI: 0.2–0.6), financial incentives for non-NIP vaccination (Hib vaccine: OR = 1.9, 95% CI: 1.1–3.6; PCV: OR = 2.1, 95% CI: 1.1–3.9; rotavirus vaccine: OR = 2.0, 95% CI: 1.1–3.8) and perception of vaccine safety (Hib vaccine: OR = 2.7, 95% CI: 1.1–7.0; PCV: OR = 3.2, 95% CI: 1.2–8.0; rotavirus vaccine: OR = 3.0, 95% CI: 1.2–7.7) were associated with public health workers’ recommendation towards Hib vaccine, PCV and rotavirus vaccine.ConclusionsThe findings highlighted public health workers’ recommendation behaviors of non-NIP vaccines in China and revealed strong association between vaccine recommendation and financial incentives. This highlights the importance of financial incentives in public health workers’ recommendation toward non-NIP vaccines in China. Proper incentives are recommended for public health workers to encourage effective health promotion in immunization practices.Graphical

Artisanal small-scale mining, farm labour attraction and household welfare in Ghana

The discourse on the impact of artisanal small-scale mining (ASM) has often concentrated on land degradation, and surface water pollution. How ASM is increasingly attracting farm labourers (FL) in mining communities is rarely discussed. Drawing insight from selected mining communities, which combines the perspectives and experiences of small-scale miners, farmers, academics, and policymakers, this article uses the endogenous switching regression model to identify the determinants of FL attraction to ASM as well as the drivers of labour welfare. The model estimated the impact of labour supply on consumption expenditure per adult equivalent. The results show that FL decision to shift to ASM sector is constructed around welfare incentives. For instance, FL who joined ASM increased their consumption expenditure per adult equivalent by 66.6 percent. The article established that ASM provides crucial livelihoods to rural households. Meanwhile, if proper incentives such as fertilizer subsidy and agriculture extension intensification are not put in place, the labour attraction by ASM will have detrimental effects on food security. Therefore, proper regulatory frameworks should be enforced by duty-bearers to regulate the activities of ASM as it provides welfare improvements to farmers. Lastly, further studies should investigate the decency of labour supply services to ASM.

Consortium Blockchain-Based Spectrum Trading for Network Slicing in 5G RAN: A Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Network slicing (NS) is envisioned as an emerging paradigm for accommodating different virtual networks on a common physical infrastructure. Considering the integration of blockchain and NS, a secure decentralized spectrum trading platform can be established for autonomous radio access network (RAN) slicing. Moreover, the realization of proper incentive mechanisms for fair spectrum trading is crucial for effective RAN slicing. This paper proposes a novel hierarchical framework for blockchain-empowered spectrum trading for NS in RAN. Specifically, we deploy a consortium blockchain platform for spectrum trading among spectrum providers and buyers for slice creation, and autonomous slice adjustment. For slice creation, the spectrum providers are infrastructure providers (InPs) and buyers are mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). Then, underloaded MVNOs with extra spectrum to spare, trade with overloaded MVNOs, for slice spectrum adjustment. For proper incentive maximization, we propose a three-stage Stackelberg game framework among InPs, seller MVNOs, and buyer MVNOs, for joint optimal pricing and demand prediction strategies. Then, a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) method is designed to achieve a Stackelberg equilibrium (SE). Security assessment and extensive simulation results confirm the security and efficacy of our proposed method in terms of players’ utility maximization and fairness, compared with other baselines.

International best practices for e-waste take back and policy interventions for India

PurposeIndia generates around two million tonnes of e-waste every year, and it is increasing at a very high rate of 30%. However, due to inefficient handling of infrastructure and limited number of collection centres along with the absence of proper incentive structure for producer and recyclers, 95% of e-waste reaches to unorganized sector for disposal. Consumers are not aware of the need of proper e-waste disposal and in absence of proper motivation and they are not inclined towards recycling process. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the best practices of e-waste take adopted all over the world to implement effective policy interventions for e-waste management in India and other emerging economies.Design/methodology/approachThis paper has recommended preventive as well as curative policy interventions on the basis of best e-waste management practices of Germany, Italy and Japan; life cycle assessment of e-waste; and SWOT analysis of Indian electronic product industry.FindingsPreventive measures include a deposit refund scheme wherein a consumer will be responsible for depositing a refundable fees during the purchase of the product. The amount should be arrived at keeping in mind cost involved in handling e-waste and ensure some motivation for the consumers to give back used product. To ensure proper tracking of the product, Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can be used which will be activated at the time of sale of product and remain so until product reaches some designated recycling space or recycler and consumer is returned back his deposit fee. Subsidy to the producers and recyclers can also be provided by the government to further incentivize the whole process. An example of mobile phones has been used to understand the proposed deposit fees and associated cost structure. Curative measures to reduce the generation of e-waste in long run for managing the discussed issue have also been proposed.Originality/valueThis study is an initiative for proposing and implementing best e-waste take back techniques in a developing economy like India by acquiring learnings from best/advanced economies in terms of e-waste take back.

Real or Fake Text?: Investigating Human Ability to Detect Boundaries between Human-Written and Machine-Generated Text

As text generated by large language models proliferates, it becomes vital to understand how humans engage with such text, and whether or not they are able to detect when the text they are reading did not originate with a human writer. Prior work on human detection of generated text focuses on the case where an entire passage is either human-written or machine-generated. In this paper, we study a more realistic setting where text begins as human-written and transitions to being generated by state-of-the-art neural language models. We show that, while annotators often struggle at this task, there is substantial variance in annotator skill and that given proper incentives, annotators can improve at this task over time. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed comparison study and analyze how a variety of variables (model size, decoding strategy, fine-tuning, prompt genre, etc.) affect human detection performance. Finally, we collect error annotations from our participants and use them to show that certain textual genres influence models to make different types of errors and that certain sentence-level features correlate highly with annotator selection. We release the RoFT dataset: a collection of over 21,000 human annotations paired with error classifications to encourage future work in human detection and evaluation of generated text.

Uncovering the interplay between political will, public management reforms, and outcomes: a study of the United Arab Emirates

The aim of the study is to fill the gap in the existing literature by presenting a comprehensive and theoretically sound framework that examines the interplay between the attributes of political will, public management reform design and implementation, the results they yield and the impact of external factors on these variables. Drawing upon the systematic literature review, the research develops a conceptual framework of political will and applies it to the context of public management reforms in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A wide range of databases are used from secondary sources including Worldwide Governance Indicators, Failed State Index, Global Innovation Index, and Transparency International. The results show that the UAE government's strong commitment to reforms, as well as its ability to implement those reforms effectively, has contributed to positive outcomes in areas such as economic development and public service delivery. UAE has liberalized its economy and institutionalized innovative practices. All actors are involved in reform initiatives. Given the developmental clientelist regime in the UAE, political leadership has played an instrumental role in successfully implementing public management reforms. The UAE Government has ensured capacity-building efforts and proper incentives such as Government Excellence Awards are in place for the continuity of reform initiatives. Other government regimes could potentially benefit from the approaches employed by the UAE government in undertaking public management reform initiatives. The results challenge the common assumption that monarchical regimes are unable to drive such changes and instead demonstrate that a development-focused clientelist state can effectively implement incremental reforms in public management. The proposed conceptual model will also potentially guide future empirical research in the field.