Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström were awarded the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their fundamental contributions to contract theory. This article offers a short summary and discussion of their path breaking work.

This paper studies organizations with autocratic decisionmaking.

Over the last few years, worldwide mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have increasedsharply both in terms of value and volume. This development has not only beendriven by corporate acquirers but also to an increasing extent by private equityinvestors. In this paper, we analyze differences in...

This paper investigates how patent applications and grants held by new ventures improve their ability to attract venture capital (VC) financing. We argue that investors are faced with considerable uncer-tainty and therefore rely on patents as signals when trying to assess the prospects of...

The existing literature identifies patent thickets indirectly. In this paper we propose a novel measure based on patent citations which allows us to measure the density of patent thickets directly. We discuss the algorithm which generates the measure and present descriptive results validating...

The object of the present analysis is organizational slack. The paper targets ata “slack type” which consists of basic information deriving from slack functions,slack conditions, antecedents of slack and dispositional requirements ofslack. The purpose of the analysis is the creation of a...

Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt, dass die Festlegung der Fertigungstiefein der Gegenstromplanung von Strategien kein stringentes Instrumentder Unternehmensführung ist. Die Top-Down und Bottom-Up Analyseüber die hierarchischen Ebenen der Unternehmens-, Wettbewerbs- undFunktionalstrategie liefert...

We study whether one reason behind female underrepresentation in leadership is that female leaders are less effective at coordinating followers' actions. Two experiments using coordination games investigate whether female leaders are less successful than males in persuading followers to...

Reference-dependent preferences can explain several puzzling observations about organizational change. We introduce a dynamic model in which a loss-neutral firm bargains with loss-averse workers over organizational change and wages. We show that change is often stagnant or slow for long periods...

Organizations increasingly rely on teams to solve complex problems. The ability of teams to work well together is critical to their success. I experimentally test whether team performance is affected by whether team members like each other. I find that teams in which partners like each other do...