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...

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...

The main purpose of the paper is to provide a mathematical background for the theory of bond markets similar to that available for stock markets. We suggest two constructions of stochastic integrals with respect to processes taking values in a space of continuous functions. Such integrals are...

We consider an incomplete market in the form of a multidimensional Markovian factor model, driven by a general marked point process (representing discrete jump events) as well as by a standard multidimensional Wiener process. Within this framework we study arbitrage free good deal pricing bounds...

In this paper, which is a substantial extension of the earlier essay Björk (2001), we give an overview of some recent work on the geometric properties of the evolution of the forward rate curve in an arbitrage free bond market. The main problems to be discussed are as follows. <p> 1. When is a...</p>