We attempt to formulate and explain two types of self-fulfilling prophecy, called the Pygmalion effect (if a supervisor thinks her subordinates will succeed, they are more likely to succeed) and the Galatea effect (if a person thinks he will succeed, he is more likely to succeed). To this...

We study the relation between formal incentives and social exchange in organizations where employees work for several managers and reciprocate a manager's attention with higher effort. To this end we develop a common agency model with two-sided moral hazard. We show that when effort is...

We develop a model of manager-employee relationships where employees care more for their manager when they are more convinced that their manager cares for them. Managers can signal their altruistic feelings towards their employees in two ways: by offering a generous wage and by giving attention....

Confirmation bias, which refers to unintentional and unknowing selectivity in the use of evidence, belongs to the major problems faced by organizations. In this article, we discuss job rotation as a natural solution to this problem. In a nutshell, adopting job rotation provides an organization...

We address the question how much authority a principal should delegate to a manager with conflicting interests and uncertain ability in a context in which the manager has both compensation-based and reputational incentives. The optimal level of authority balances the value of the manager's...

We investigate a team setting in which workers have different degrees of commitment to the outcome of their work. We show that if there are complementarities in production and if the team manager has some information about team members, interventions that the manager undertakes in order to...

How can a manager influence workers' activity while knowing little about it? This paper examines a situation where production requires several tasks, and the manager wants to direct production to achieve a preferred allocation of effort across tasks. However, the effort that is required for each...

We analyze the effects of lower bounds on wages, e.g., minimum wages or liability limits, on job design within firms. In our model, two tasks contribute to non-veriable firm value and affect an imperfect performance measure. The tasks can be assigned to either one or two agents. In the absence...

Wenngleich die genaue Zahl der mittelständischen Unternehmen in Deutschland durchaus umstritten ist, so wird doch auf jeden Fall zunächst einmal der Handlungsbedarf im Bereich der Unternehmensnachfolge deutlich. Denn nahezu jede Übernahme eines bestehenden Unternehmens erfordert ein...

"Nachfolgeregelung durch Unternehmenskauf - Werkzeuge für die Bewertung und Finanzierung kleiner und mittelständischer Unternehmen im Rahmen einer externen Nachfolge" - die Themenstellung dieser Arbeit enthält zwei Schwerpunkte aus dem Gesamtprozess der Unternehmensnachfolge durch Verkauf: -...