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...

In this paper, we investigate optimal delegation mechanisms in the presence of countervailing conflicts of interest in the context of principal-agent problems. We introduce two dimensions of conflict of interest-pandering incentives related to the outside option and project biases. We compare...

The paper provides a specification of belief systems for models of large economies with anonymity in which aggregate states depend only on cross-section distributions of types. For belief systems satisfying certain conditions of mutual absolute continuity, the paper gives a necessary and...

Rodrigues-Neto (2009) has shown that a given specification of posteriors of different players in an incomplete-information setting is compatible with a common prior if and only if the posteriors satisfy the so-called cycle equations. This note shows that, if, for any player, any element of the...

Ordered social life requires rules of conduct that help generate and preserve peaceful and cooperative interactions among individuals. The problem is that these social rules impose costs. They prohibit us from doing some things we might see as important and they require us to do other things...