The Delegation Dilemma: Economies of Scale, Accountability, and Polycentric Governance
arXiv:2610.21746v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many collective-action systems are neither fully decentralized nor fully centralized: agents voluntarily organize into institutions that share organizational costs and delegate decisions to representatives. Delegation can reduce individual costs, but it also transfers control to representatives whose private objectives need not align with those of their constituents. We study this tension in a repeated game with endogenous delegation to self-int…