I develop a model of public sector contracting based on the multitask framework by Holmström and Milgrom (1991). In this model, an agent can put effort into increasing the quality of a service or reducing costs. Being residual claimants, private owners have stronger incentives to cut costs than...

In 1873, Denmark, Norway and Sweden formed the Scandinavian Currency Union (SCU) and adopted the gold standard. The Union worked fairly smoothly during the next thirty years and was partly extended until 1914. The outbreak of World War I triggered a series of events that eventually would lead to...

We model organizational decision making as costless pre-play communication. Decision making is called authoritarian if only one player is allowed to speak and consensual if all players are allowed to speak. Players are assumed to have limited cognitive capacity and we characterize their behavior...

A purchaser/provider split together with output- based reimbursement were recently introduced by several Swedish county councils. These changes have been motivated by arguments of efficiency and consumer choice. This paper tests the null hypothesis that hospital services are provided as...

This is a dictionary entry forthcoming in Peter Newman, ed. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, London: Macmillan, 1998.

A hierarchically structured rent-seeking contest may be associated with lower equilibrium expenditure than a corresponding flat contest. In this chapter we discuss how this fact may be used to explain the structure of organizations such as firms, including why firms commonly have outside owners.

A separation of provider and purchaser roles - together with performance-based reimbursement - were recently introduced in several county councils, which are the local governments that provide and fund almost all health care in Sweden. These changes have been motivated by efficiency and consumer...

We model networks of relational (or implicit)contracts, exploring how sanctioning power and equilibrium conditions change under different network configurations and information transmission technologies. In our model, relations are the links, and the value of the network lies in its ability to...

We suggest an operational definition of transaction cost as the expected value of strategy information in games played by individuals randomly matched from a large population. We relate the concept of a transaction cost minimum to those of Nash equilibrium, efficiency, and evolutionary...

This paper deals with the interplay between economic incentives and social norms in firms. We outline a simple model of team production and provide preliminary results on linear incentive schemes in the presence of a social norm that may cause multiple equilibria. The effect of the social norm...