The paper studies the nature, determinants, and impacts of "negative" activities in organizations. In competing for promotion, the members in organizations can work not only to enhance their own performances, but also to "sabotage" their opponents' performances. They find it worthwhile to engage...

The paper studies the nature, determinants, and impacts of "negative" activities in organizations. In competing for promotion, the members in organizations can work not only to enhance their own performances, but also to "sabotage" their opponents' performances. They find it worthwhile to engage...

The separation of ownership and control in firms brings up the issue of how and what to delegate to managers. There exists a large body of literature that analyzes strategic delegation in which owners understand the incentives that managers face when they operate in imperfectly competitive...

Costly competitions between economic agents are modeled as contests. Researchers use laboratory experiments to study contests and test comparative static predictions of contest theory. Commonly, researchers find that participants' efforts are significantly higher than predicted by the standard...

We consider multi-stage elimination contests, where agents efforts at different stages generate some output for the organizers. Depending on the output function we characterize the optimal prize structure of the tournament and show that it is almost efficient. We have found that in some cases...

This paper studies the "negative" activities of members in organizations. In competing for promotion, the members not only can work to enhance their own performances, but can also work to "sabotage" their opponents in order to decrease their performances. They find it worthwhile to engage in...

We provide a model of dynamic duopoly in which firms face financial constraints and disappear when they are unable to fulfill them. We show that, in some cases, Cournot outputs are no longer supported in equilibrium, because if these outputs were set, a firm may have incentives to ruin the...