Ricerc@Sapienza

Non-governamental organizations (henceforth NGOs) and Non-profit organizations (henceforth NPOs) have, among their tasks, that of raising funds for their projects. Thus, they have to allocate their time/effort in at least two basic tasks, raising funds and realize their specific projects. The aim of this research is to investigate whether in such environment is advisable for them to have multiple decision layers, namely rationally delegate some of the organizations tasks to agents with different preferences, with the additional possibility to manipulate their objective functions through appropriate incentive schemes. There exists a broad literature on strategic delegation for profit maximizing oligopolistic firms (Vickers 1985, Freshman and Judd 1989, Sklivas 1989), but none has yet applied this framework to NGOs. In particular we are interested to study whether the choice to delegate arises endogenously in NGOs, and whether this is advantageous for NGOs. In this research project, after a survey of the existing managerial practices in NGOs, and a data survey on Italian NGOs (conducted by using Agenzia delle Entrate financial data on voluntary organizations and ISTAT most recent survey on nonprofits) we will investigate whether and when NGOs can receive benefits from delegation. For this purpose we will build up an explicative model to show when there is actually incentive to delegate for NGOs: is this occurring in highly competitive environments, namely when NGOs' projects are close substitutes or, conversely, when their projects are highly differentiated? Moreover, we intend to assess whether highly targeted fundraising activities, implying low fundraising spillovers and harmful fundrasing externalities for NGOs in competition with other NGOs for donations, favor or not a process of strategic delegation inside these organizations.