We model a managerial decision environment in which a manager both determines the skill heterogeneity of her workers and determines whether to retain or delegate the ability to allocate tasks. The manager prefers delegating when uncertainty is sufficiently high relative to the incentive conflict...

We consider a bandit problem faced by a team of two heterogeneous players. The team is hierarchical in that one (the principal) retains the exclusive right to terminate the project while the other (the agent) focuses strictly on implementing the project assigned to him. As a key departure, we...

We consider a bandit problem faced by a team of two heterogeneous players. The team is hierarchical in that one (the principal) retains the exclusive right to terminate the project while the other (the agent) focuses strictly on implementing the project assigned to him. As a key departure, we...

We analyze a class of coordination games in which the Kth player to submit an entry wins a contest. These games have an infinite number of symmetric equilibria and the set of equilibria does not change with K. We run experiments with 15 participants and with K=3, 7, and 11. Our experiments show...

This paper studies the effect of trade facilitation on vertical firm structure using plant-level data from Switzerland. Based on the Business Census and the Input-Output table, we first calculate a binary measure of vertical integration for all plants registered in Switzerland. We then estimate...

This study adds to our understanding of outsourcing decision-making by examining the differential effect of potential cost and non-cost innovation benefits on outsourcing choices made by top managers. In addition, we show that value appropriation - which we define in this context as a firm's...

We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the staggered entry of new managers into India's 42 public R&D labs between 1994 and 2006 to study how alignment between the CEO and middle-level managers affect research productivity. We show that the introduction of new lab managers aligned with the...