Innovation and Bureaucracy Under Soft and Hard Budget Constraints
研究官僚体制与财务约束作为筛选机制如何影响创新，发现软预算约束下官僚体制会替代硬约束的事后筛选，但会延误创新并造成效率损失，尤其适用于解释中央计划经济中计算机产业表现不佳的原因。
Because of the inherent uncertainty, promotion of innovation critically depends on screening mechanisms to select projects. This paper studies the relationship between bureaucracy and financial constraints as two such mechanisms. The lack of commitment to hard financial constraints interferes with its ex post screening capability; ex ante bureaucratic screening is optimally chosen as a substitute. However, bureaucracy makes mistakes by rejecting promising projects and delays innovation, and the efficiency loss due to soft financial constraints increases as prior knowledge becomes worse and as research stage investment requirements become lower. In a centralized economy, bureaucracy may reduce the number of parallel projects, particularly for projects with higher uncertainties and less research stage requirements. This theory fits much of the evidence and in particular it explains why the computer industry, but not the nuclear or aerospace industries, has fared so poorly in centralized economies.