This paper studies how a three-layer hierarchical firm (principal-supervisor-agent) optimally creates effort norms for its employees. The key assumption is that effort norms are affected by the example of superiors. In equilibrium, norms are eroded as one moves down the hierarchy. The reason is...

I study organizations in which agents are connected through a fixed, un-directed, and unweighted network, and work collectively to produce a team output. Besides choosing own effort that contributes directly to the team output, agents can also exert helping effort to their network neighbors so...

This paper presents a critical overview of some recent attempts at building formal models of organizations as information-processing and problem-solving entities. We distinguish between two classes of models according to two distinct objects of analysis. The first class includes models mainly...

The choice of organization structure between business group and conglomerate depends on the cost of ownership and the cost of market contracting. The advantages of business groups come from its flexibility in ownership compositions and the limited liability of member firms in the event of...

This paper studies organizational design as the allocation of decision rights, primarily focusing on its interplay with agents' career motives. I identify a new tradeoff between delegation and centralization, which arises solely from career concerns: When delegated, an agent takes inefficient...

The paper analyzes how the choice of organizational structure leads to the best compromise between controlling behavior based on authority rights and minimizing costs for implementing high efforts. Concentrated delegation and hierarchical delegation turn out to be never an optimal compromise. If...

This paper empirically investigates how the level of authority delegation is related to the performance of an organization. Decentralized, horizontal organizational structure takes advantage of more efficient decision making, mainly due to more efficient use of "soft" information. The cost of...

This paper studies the impact of innovation on the organizational structure. The theoretical framework predicts that a larger parental pool of knowledge raises the probability of oshoring. This holds in a national as well as an international context. However, when the producer loses territorial...

This paper studies the impact of innovation on the organizational structure. The theoretical framework predicts that a larger parental pool of knowledge raises the probability of offshoring. This holds in a national as well as an international context. However, when the producer loses...