An uninformed principal elicits non-contractible recommendations from a privately informed agent regarding the quality of projects. The agent is biased in favor of implementation and no credible communication is possible in a one-shot setting. In a repeated setting, the fear of losing future...

This thesis consists of three theoretical essays that examine the role of organizational architecture in facilitating organizational adaptation to a changing environment. Chapter 1 develops a model of coordinated adaptation where .an organization needs to respond to incoming information about...

Agents need to be motivated to develop ideas and to share information regarding their potential value. When the principal needs to rely on the agents' claims when choosing between the alternatives, she needs to decide how conflict between the alternatives is resolved. This resolution can be...

To generate downstream sales, manufacturers often spend both effort and compensation when working with their dealers. Existing theories are inconclusive about the interdependent role of the two kinds of instruments in motivating dealer effort; that is, whether they are substitutes or...

A manager's compensation contract and the level of resources available to him jointly influence his incentives to acquire information about different investment alternatives as well as his resource allocate decisions. We show that the optimal compensation contract induces investment allocations...

Authority, as the right to instruct others and to expect obedience, is often presented as a key mechanism for coordination. But when obedience is voluntary, how is authority sustained and how effective is it in managing behavior? To address these questions, this paper examines a repeated game of...

We analyze a class of sender-receiver games with quadratic payoffs, which includes the communication games in Alonso, Dessein and Matouschek (2008) and Rantakari (2008) as special cases, for which the receiver's maximum expected payoff when players have access to arbitrary, mediated...

An agent and a principal are engaged in an ongoing relationship, where the agent receives project opportunities of random value and is biased towards implementation. Each period, the principal elicits a (non-contractible) recommendation from the agent, compares it to a random outside option and...

An agent and a principal are engaged in an ongoing relationship, where the agent receives project opportunities of random value and is biased towards implementation. Each period, the principal elicits a (non-contractible) recommendation from the agent, compares it to a random outside option and...

I analyze a problem of project selection where two agents, privately informed of both the true value and their bias in favor of their projects, make non-verifiable proposals to an uninformed decision-maker. The analysis makes two contributions. First, I examine the consequences of preference...