ACCOUNTABILITY AND A METRIC FOR CREDIBILITY AND COMPLIANCE

When competence and habitual devotion to assigned tasks, rather than t ime consistency, are most at issue, past performance bears on the cred ibility of future commitments by the same agents. Yet there are no agr eed or readily communicable conventions for keeping score: It is not c lear what most scoring schemes could reveal about the degree of system atic effort made to meet announced goals and hence about the credibili ty of such goals in stochastic settings. This paper attempts to provid e scoring conventions and statistical measures that would yield a tran sparent metric for representing degrees of credibility and testing hyp otheses about them under controlled conditions.