We analyze the optimal allocation of authority in an organization whose members have conflicting preferences. One party has decision-relevant private information, and the party who obtains authority decides in a self-interested way. As a novel element in the literature on decision rights, we...

Behavioral implementation studies implementation when agents' choices need not be rational. All existing papers of this literature, however, fail to handle a large class of choice behaviors because they rely on a well-known condition called Unanimity. This condition says, roughly speaking, that...

This paper challenges the assertion that European politics would be closer to the citizens' preferences if decision power were transferred from the Council of Ministers to the European Parliament. On the one hand, citizens benefit from a greater transparency in the Parliamentś debates compared...

This paper explores the optimal provision of dynamic incentives for employees with reciprocal preferences. Building on the presumption that a relational contract can establish a norm of reciprocity, I show that generous upfront wages that activate an employee’s reciprocal preferences are more...

This paper studies a principal-agent relation in which the principal's private information about the agent's effort choice is more accurate than a noisy public performance measure. For some contingencies the optimal contract has to specify ex post inefficiencies in the form of inefficient...