Ashraf Haque

Ashraf Haque is a Ph.D. candidate at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, specializing in behavioral public administration and public and nonprofit management. His research starts from a deceptively simple puzzle: why do so many stubborn governance problems persist even when the structural fixes seem obvious? His answer lies in the cognitive biases and behavioral anomalies that standard rational models routinely overlook.

His dissertation, “Technology and the Efficiency–Accountability Trade-Off in Public and Nonprofit Management,” is organized around that conviction. The central question is whether technology can genuinely resolve the tension between efficiency and accountability in governance—or whether it merely reproduces that trade-off in new forms. Across three essays, he argues that the answer depends critically on how behavioral biases shape human responses to technological systems.

Beyond his dissertation, Ashraf studies administrative decision-making and policy processes, with a focus on how to increase public administrators' appetite for evidence-based policymaking and how behavioral mechanisms can be integrated into traditional policy design tools to improve their real-world effectiveness.

Before joining Maxwell, Ashraf held senior leadership roles in the international development sector in Bangladesh, including as country director of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) Bangladesh and GiveDirectly Bangladesh.