Preregistration for "Sector Bias and Structural Trade-offs: A Between-Within-Subjects Experiment on After-School Programs"

Do trade-offs among different structural forms of service delivery organizations influence citizens’ preferences for public services? Existing literature on sector bias demonstrates that citizens hold subconscious biases regarding service delivery (Hvidman, 2019; Lee & Kim, 2024; Marvel, 2015, 2016; Meier et al., 2022). Despite their negative influence on the public sector and its employees, relatively little is known about the origins of these biases. Behavioral studies attribute them to values linked to service type (Hvidman & Andersen, 2016), prior familiarity with service delivery (Meier et al., 2022), and political-cultural dynamics in citizen–bureaucrat interactions (Szydlowski et al., 2022; Neo et al., 2024). Existing research has largely overlooked the inherent structural differences among service delivery organizations across sectors. In contrast to public organizations, whose structures are often shaped by procedural constraints and high formalization (Rainey, Fernandez, & Malatesta, 2021), a significant portion of nonprofit organizations operate at a nascent stage and often have yet to develop established procedures (Andersson, 2016; Searing & Lecy, 2022). Procedures that ensure stability and promote public value can also impose compliance burdens, potentially leading to negative perceptions of public organizations (Bozeman, 1993; Kaufman, 1977; van Loon et al., 2016). The link between these trade-offs and citizens' perceptions remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap in the literature on sector bias, the present study employs a between-within design using a forced-choice experiment to examine parents’ relative emphasis on structural attributes of service delivery organizations – (1) stability, (2) red tape, (3) flexibility – varies across sectors. We selected the context of after-school programs offered by public schools and nonprofit community centers, as it offers an ideal setting for comparing sectoral preferences due to shared funding sources, overlapping users, and similar services (Halpern, 1999). This study contributes to research on sectoral bias by highlighting trade-offs among structural factors as a source of differing citizen expectations for public and nonprofit organizations, which may lead to biases in performance appraisals.