The purpose of this paper is to offer a formal model of corporate income tax evasion. While individual tax evasion is essentially a portfolio selection problem, corporate income tax evasion is much more complicated. When the owner of a firm decides to evade taxes, not only does it risk being...

This paper analyzes the efficiency of team production when agents exhibit other regarding preferences. It is shown that full efficiency can be sustained as an equilibrium through a budget-balancing mechanism that punishes some randomly chosen agents if output falls short of efficient level but...

We formulate and solve the problem of optimal mechanism-design by a principal facing adverse selection and moral hazard from different sources. The parties' decision problem is comprised of a publicly observable collective choice and a partially private social choice. As in agency with pure...

Corporate scandals, reflected in excessive management compensation and fraudulent accounts, cause great damage. Agency theory’s insistence to link the compensation of mangers and directors as closely as possible to firm performance is a major reason for these scandals. They cannot be overcome...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that governance structure and contractual form are two distinct concepts and that they should not be used interchangeably in both theoretical and empirical studies of transaction cost economics. Specifically, the choice of governance structure does not...

The principal management theoretical lenses for examining leveraged buyouts have been the agency theory and information asymmetries. Occasionally a wider number of theories and concepts have been invoked, such as the parenting advantage, the resource-based view, and the market for corporate...

The keys to effective teamwork in firms are (1) carefully designed team-formation policies that take into account what level of diversity of skills, knowledge, and demographics is desirable and (2) balanced team-based incentives. Employers need to choose policies that maximize the gains from...

This paper contends that there is an important distinction between governance structure and contractual form, and that organizational boundaries, defined by governance structures, need not explain contractual form. The basic idea is that governance refers to the general environments and...

I examine a game-theoretical model of two variants of double-elimination tournaments, and derive the equilibrium behavior of symmetric players and the optimal prize allocation assuming a designer aims to maximize total effort. I compare these theoretical properties to the well-known...

Representative democracy consists of a chain of delegation from voters to the executive and a corresponding chain of accountability, with some questions (particularly constitutional questions) reserved for popular vote. This structure reflects the high transaction costs of coordinating...