We are concerned with the design of a constitution for a firm - an ex ante contract which assigns residual rights of control (and possibly residual income rights) without reference to the issue to be decided. We focus attention on two polar constitutions: non-profit cooperatives and outside...

The purpose of this paper is to identify the organisational comparative advantage of NGOs, and to develop a model which explains the set of circumstances uder which they emerge and dominate other types of firms. It is argued that the potential superiority of NGOs derives from two features: (1)...

This paper analyzes peer effects among university scientists. Specifically, it investigates whether the number of peers and their average quality affects the productivity of researchers in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The usual endogeneity problems related to estimating peer effects are...

A unifying theme in the literature on organizations such as public bureaucracies and private non-profits is the importance of missions, as opposed to profit, as an organizational goal. Such mission-oriented organizations are frequently staffed by motivated agents who subscribe to the mission....

We utilize the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (1964) mechanism to estimate the willingness to pay for clean drinking water technology in northern Ghana. The BDM mechanism has attractive properties for empirical research, allowing us to directly estimate demand, compute heterogeneous treatment effects,...

In many countries, pension funds based on individual accounts have been affected by high operating costs. Contract theory helps to unravel the nature of such problems: managers of pension funds have strong incentives to manipulate market expectations about their capacity through wasteful...

We model a two-region country where value is created through bilateral production between masses and elites (bourgeois and landowners). Industrialization requires the elites to finance schools and the masses to attend them. Schooling raises productivity, particularly for matches between masses...

Online marketplaces for remote labor services allow workers and firms to contract with each other directly. Despite this, a large fraction of the workforce is affiliated with small, autonomous intermediary organizations that are widespread within these markets. This paper shows that...

Online markets for remote labor services allow workers and firms to contract with each other directly. Despite this, intermediaries - called outsourcing agencies - have emerged in these markets. This paper shows that agencies signal to employers that inexperienced workers are high quality....

We use a mechanism–design approach to study a team whose members choose a joint project and exert individual efforts to execute it. Members have private information about the qualities of alternative projects. Information sharing is obstructed by a trade–off between adaptation and...