The paper tries to establish for a large European car dealership whether target ratcheting and target achievements are associated with the type of contract offered to the franchisee in the dealership. We find that the franchisor sets different targets within a common stair-step incentive scheme...

Inter-firm R&D collaborations through contractual arrangements have become increasingly popular, but in many cases they are broken up without any joint discovery. We provide a rationale for the breakup date in R&D collaboration agreements. More specifically, we consider a research consortium...

The aim of the paper is to set the agency problem into a broad context of New Institutional Economics with an emphasis on historical connections. In the first section, I explain the historical evolution of basic theoretical concepts like the theory of firm, the theory of market process and the...

We consider a "tenure-clock problem" in which a principal may set a deadline by which she needs to evaluate an agent's ability and decides whether to promote him or not. We embed this problem in a continuous-time model with both hidden action and hidden information, where the principal must...

Learning is crucial to organizational decision making but often needs to be delegated. We examine a dynamic delegation problem where a principal decides on a project with uncertain profitability. A biased agent, who is initially as uninformed as the principal, privately learns the profitability...

We consider an environment in which a principal hires an agent and evaluates his productivity over time in an ongoing relationship. The problem is embedded in a continuoustime model with both hidden action and hidden information, where the principal must induce the agent to exert effort to...

Corporate scandals, reflected in excessive management compensation and fraudulent accounts, cause considerable damage. Agency theory's insistence on linking the compensation of managers and directors as closely as possible to firm performance is a major reason for these scandals. They cannot be...