Sales agents are impatient relative to owners. If a good fails to sell, the owner still retains possession of that good and can enjoy its services, whereas the agent receives nothing. As a consequence, sales agents prefer a lower price than does an owner. Owners are therefore reluctant to...

When a firm forms a market closes. Resources that were previously allocated via the price system are allocated by managerial authority within the firm. We explore this choice of organizational form using a model of price formation in which agents negotiate prices on behalf of their principals...

Tournaments, reward structures based on rank order, are compared with individual contracts in a model with one risk-neutral principal and many risk-averse agents. Each agents' output is a stochastic function of his effort level plus an additive shock term that is common to all the agents. The...