Consider team production with two people. Each is characterized by a prior distribution that he will do Right or Wrong. After the outcome of the project is observed, these probabilities are updated. When output depends on the weakest link in production, following project failure the posterior...

This study investigates under what circumstances there exist a separating equilibrium in which competent leaders choose incompetent co-workers and incompetent leaders choose competent co-workers. The driving force for the competent leader is the insurance motive; if things go wrong he can blame...

A leader of an organization may view a subordinate as threatening or weakening the leader's position. The threat may increase with the subordinate's ability and reduce the rents the leader wins. In particular, a leader who trains his subordinate reduces the cost to the owner of a firm in...

This paper shows that as long as the stock market has perfect foresight, some dividends are distributed, and incentives are paid more than once or are deferred, stock-related compensation packages are strong incentives for managers to support tacit collusive agreements in repeated oligopolies....

A separating equilibrium in which competent (incompetent) leaders choose competent (incompetent) co-workers is investigated. An outside observer rewards the leader at good policy outcomes. The incompetent co-worker can, at bad outcomes, be used as scapegoat. By assumption, the leader may fail in...

The paper addresses the effects of the separation of ownership and control on long-run competition in oligopolies. It finds that when managers have the preference for smooth time-paths of profits revealed by the evidence on "income smoothing," manager-led firms can sustain any collusive...

We consider a leader and a subordinate he appoints who engage in team production. The public observes the organization’s performance, but is unable to determine the separate contributions of the leader and of the subordinate. The leader may therefore claim credit for the good work of his...

In this paper we discuss the significant computational simplification that occurs when option pricing is approached through the change of numeraire technique. The original impetus was a recently published paper (Hoang, Powell, Shi 1999) on endowment options; in the present paper we extend these...

We develop a structural bond pricing approach and implement it on a large panel of US industrial bonds using an efficient maximum likelihood methodology. We evaluate the model's ability to predict yield spread levels and changes out-of-sample. Errors are smaller and distinctly less variable than...

For finite dimensional factor models, the paper studies general quadratic term structures. These term structures include as special cases the affine term structures and the Gaussian quadratic term structures, previously studied in the literature. We show, however, that there are other,...