The Pattern Of Power Allocation And Incentives In University

Just as the story of other industries, in the big background of the whole society transformation, the higher education of China is also appear many problems. These problem performance several aspects, such as the teacher's teaching devotion shortage, low research level and academic corrupt etc. Though the problems are multiplicity, essentially all the organization problems came down to the incentives shortage of inside behavior. For resolving these problems, the related section adopted a lot of ways, for example the high school industry of the earlier period and merge with later university etc., but the problem seem to be not resolved.The theory of incentives tells us, especial incentives of a given organization lie on its special characters, so, may cause of the Chinese higher education problems is that the understanding to the higher education organization is still far from enough. University, as a organization, has its own characteristics, which distinguishes itself from other organizations in nature. Concretely, the characteristics of the university can be defined into two aspects, one is nonprofit, the other is the human capital specialization of the internal personnel. This two characters make great challenge to the incentives thought of firm theory. First, the nonprofit ability cause residual claims, which is the finally and the most powerful incentive method of profit organization, becomes useless in university incentives..Secondly, the human capital specialization of the experts in the university hides (conceals) a great deal of information in individual, but these information are exactly the foundations on which a manager make decision, so, in the university, the function of governor personal ability is not greater than that in"simple organization", because his cost to collect decision information is too high.So, next problem is, since the university contain such characteristics, how should we resolve the incentive problem of the university? At the mention of the content to incent, because of university's nonprofit characteristics, the rights(such as residual claims) of the firm theories is obsolescent, therefore, we have to choice the power(power) as our tools to analyzes. That is, we should research power's influence on the university, further more, the influence of different power allocation pattern. Obviously, power's influence is realized by affecting the people who hold it. However, the behavior in the university includes a lot, but the stimulation will create active efficiency of university, for example, the teacher employment system reform of Peking University in 2003 concentrated the object for encourage on teachers.But, in currently the Chinese higher education organization, the incentive problem of manage should be more urgent than that of teacher. Because the governor of the university encourage the teacher, but the governor is not the real host of the university either, so, they also need to be encouraged, if he work not hard, the mission to encourage teacher can not be completed. So, the emphases to research is clear, that is using the different pattern of power collocate to encourage the governor of university. Concretely, we divided the mission in the university into two kinds: Academic mission and administration mission and also divided the governor into two kinds: The academic leader and administration leader. Based on this foundation, we defined two patterns of power collocate: The centralization pattern and decentralization pattern. In this way, our problem predigests into the compare of this two patterns.In order to compare two kinds of patterns, we use relative systemic principal-agent theory to build our model. On the assumption that the other conditions (such as quantity, price and common production costs) hold constant, we turn the compare of different organization into the compare of the agent costs (that is the incentive costs or information transfer costs). The organization's agent cost is higher, it's efficiency is more lower. In the core of this paper, we analyzed the influence of two kinds of modes at different of assumption, and compared them, then, got a series propositions. Of cause, the academic analysis is very abstract, so, in order to provide real meaning, it's necessary to verify the model's proposition with the demonstration. The last part of this paper is just the responses to the problem.The paper's structure is arranged as follows: first, in the hypothesis of symmetrical information, we form a simple model, and discuss different patterns how to influence the efficiency (chapter 3). Then, plus to incentive problem on this basis, we set up the centralization and the decentralization power pattern model respectively. Chapter 4 is a principal-agent model, in which one agent carry out the output by complete two missions. This model is an abstract and simplification of the centralization pattern. We give results under circumstances of complete information; the morals risk and the existence agent incumbency consume respectively in the discussion, and compare the results. In chapter 5, we analyses the problems with multi-agent model. As the same, we also discusses under the conditions of complete information, morals risk and the agent incumbency consume ,by so doing, we can compare the result of two models under this conditions, and compare the patterns'efficiency through comparing the agent costs of two models, besides, we find the conditions of each pattern's high efficiency. The last part (chapter 6) is a experience analyses, in which we use 83 famous universities date of 2002-2005 years (Panel Date) to research the academic power and administration power in China. The result reveals the characters of China universities, and verifies a former proposition.