I develop an agency model of job assignments where jobs differ based on the breadth of tasks. A tradeoff between task complementarities and relative abilities of workers results in those with balanced skills being assigned to multitask jobs. The same tradeoff between complementarities and...

We examine how banks and financial markets interact with one another to provide liquidity to investors. The critical assumption is that financial markets are characterized by limited enforcement of contracts, and in the event of default only a fraction of borrowers' assets can be seized. Limited...

We study a worker's incentives to invest in non-verifiable skills. We do this within the context of recent innovative work practices, where jobs have become more flexible. When jobs are flexible, standard approaches in the literature for firms to credibly reward skills (i.e. committing ex-ante...

A large literature, both theoretical and empirical, suggests that delegation of authority and incentives should have a positive relationship. Using data from a large cross section of British establishments, we show that the positive relationship between incentives and delegation that has been...

The failure of human capital theory to explain firm related effects on wages, new empirical approaches to internal labor markets, and new work on careers have all led to a recent surge in interest in how firm internal structure, and the jobs within firms, help determine wages. The least...

The decentralized information processing approach pioneered by Radner and Van Zandt endogenously determines the optimal hierarchy for decision making within an organization. The simplest information processing model is the one-shot problem (one set of information to process) which serves as the...

Sufficient conditions for a unique price equilibrium, in terms of the uncertainty distribution and the state contingent consumer distributions, are given for spatial duopoly. Also considered are efficiency and endogenous locations for the symmetric case and comparative statics on price flexibility.

This paper presents a model of a firm preparing to launch a product into a market where consumer preferences change over time and cannot be directly observed. Market research is used in order to determine what type of product to produce. The employees making decisions based on the market...

In spatial competition firms are likely to be uncertain about consumer locations when launching products either because of shifting demograph- ics or of asymmetric information about preferences. Realistically distri- butions of consumer locations should be allowed to vary over states and need...