Daniel Nielson and Michael Tierney's article, “Delegation to International Organizations: Agency Theory and World Bank Environmental Reform” (International Organization, Spring 2003), makes a strong argument for ways in which principal-agent (P-A) models advance theoretical explanations of the behavior and performance of international organizations (IOs). Most IOs suffer from widely recognized gaps between their mandates and their performance, gaps not well explained by the major theories in our field. P-A models are premised on the assumption that performance problems naturally arise when one actor (the principal) delegates to another actor (the agent) the authority to act in the former's interests. The models seek to explain why and how the divergence of interests between the two parties may result in the agent's actions differing from the principal's intentions, how agents may be better controlled, and the costs of doing so.I would like to thank Barbara Connolly, Martha Finnemore, Jeffry Frieden, Dan Guttman, Patrick Jackson, Carmela Lutmar, and Melissa Moye for helpful comments.
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Tamar Gutner (2005) studied this question.