Performance feedback and policy diffusion: evidence from Chinese city governments subsidizing new energy vehicles
研究检验了绩效反馈如何影响中国城市政府采纳新能源汽车补贴政策，发现城市在绩效优于过去时更不愿采纳，落后于同行时则更可能采纳，且历史差距的影响大于社会差距。
We theoretically develop and quantitatively test the linkage between performance feedback and policy diffusion. Results indicate that cities are less likely to adopt the policy when outperforming their past performance, and the probability increases when lagging behind peers. The asymmetric effects of historical and social performance gaps, larger for former, identify public-private differences in feedback-diffusion nexus. By using performance feedback to explain policy diffusion, our findings enrich the explanatory mechanisms of competition and learning in policy diffusion, and help to bridge public management and policy process literature. Our findings suggest that governments can leverage performance information to facilitate policy diffusion.