management practices related to monitoring upwards, the treatment effect is indistinguishable from zero at the 5% level. The best managed organizations incentivize their officials such that they already have sufficiently precise information that our intervention has no effect.

In column 4 of Table 5, we interact the treatment binary with the ‘Management Practices: Other’ index. Once again, the interaction is positive and significant at the 1% level. The treatment effect at the mean level of the management index is negative, implying that once again, a higher score on the management index attenuates our treatment effect towards zero. This can be clearly seen in Figure 5B, in which we plot the treatment effect at the deciles of the ‘Other’ management index, with all the controls of the specification in column 4 of Table 5. The figure presents a distribution of coefficients similar to that for monitoring, with substantial treatment effects at low levels of management, and a null effect at the 60th percentile onwards. Once again, this is consistent with the theory. At low levels of staff alignment, agents will be more responsive to reductions in costs of information acquisition as there is little crowding out from free-riding incentives. However, as the organization implements management practices that align actors’ incentives more closely, the incentive to absorb information lessens and agents aim to free-ride on each other’s efforts. Overcoming free-riding concerns with a reduction in acquisition costs becomes harder.

Together, these interactions are consistent with the idea that organizational incentives are important mediators of the data package treatment. Where incentives for information absorption are strong, officials will source information relevant for their core work without external intervention. Where incentives are weak, there is room for external intervention to improve bureaucratic knowledge. In these poorly managed environments, external provision of low-cost information can have impacts on the magnitude of officials’ errors equivalent to or greater than the design of incentives. However, improving the underlying incentives for information acquisition would yield superior information outcomes without external intervention.

# **5 Conclusions and Further Research**

This paper investigates the scale of errors in the beliefs of public officials and their determinants across a large, hierarchical public sector. It measures the subjective beliefs of public officials as to the characteristics of the citizens that they serve at all three tiers of government and across five major sectors. By comparing these beliefs with benchmark objective data from surveys and administrative data, we identify which officials have the most accurate perceptions of the characteristics of their constituents. The paper presents results from the experimental provision of an evidence briefing that aims to improve the accuracy of public officials beliefs. We find that such evidence briefings, now a common tool of economics researchers who aim to influence public policy, can improve the accuracy of officials’ beliefs. However, in line with our descriptive evidence and consistent with theory, this result is significantly mediated by organizational 29