Issue prioritization is the first stage of attention-based theories of decision-making, but remains theoretically and empirically uncharted territory in public administration research. We propose and test how issue prioritization is informed by the characteristics of the performance information on which decision-makers rely, in particular its source (internal or external information), nature (objective or subjective information), aspiration level (historical, social, or coercive aspirations), and required cognitive effort (attention costs). Furthermore, we theorize how these characteristics of performance information determine issue prioritization decisions of political and managerial decision-makers in different ways. We empirically examine issue prioritization decisions in road maintenance and primary school education using a discrete choice experiment among 2,313 local government officials. The experiment reveals that decision-makers are more likely to prioritize issues that are signaled through objective performance measures and that are articulated relative to coercive aspirations, but that the effects of the information’s source and attention costs differ between policy domains. Comparison of observational variation regarding decision-makers’ roles indicates that public managers more strongly prioritize road maintenance issues that are articulated in objective performance information, but not in primary school education. The study advances public administration research and theory with a ‘horizontal’ behavioral perspective on decision-makers’ information processing to prioritize between simultaneous performance issues.

中文翻译：

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政治和管理决策者的绩效信息和问题优先顺序：离散选择实验

问题优先排序是基于注意力的决策理论的第一阶段，但在公共行政研究中仍然是理论和经验上的未知领域。我们提出并测试如何根据决策者所依赖的绩效信息的特征来确定问题的优先级，特别是其来源（内部或外部信息）、性质（客观或主观信息）、愿望水平（历史、社会或强制愿望）和所需的认知努力（注意力成本）。此外，我们理论化了绩效信息的这些特征如何以不同的方式决定政治和管理决策者的问题优先级决策。我们通过对 2,313 名地方政府官员进行离散选择实验，实证检验了道路维护和小学教育中的问题优先级决策。实验表明，决策者更有可能优先考虑通过客观绩效衡量指标表明的问题以及与强制愿望相关的问题，但信息来源和注意力成本的影响在不同的政策领域有所不同。对决策者角色观察变化的比较表明，公共管理者更强烈地优先考虑客观绩效信息中阐明的道路维护问题，但小学教育中则没有。该研究从决策者信息处理的“横向”行为角度推进公共行政研究和理论，以对同时发生的绩效问题进行优先排序。