We analyze the effects of lower bounds on wages on optimal job design within firms. In our model, two tasks affect firm value and an imperfect performance measure. Due to cost advantages of specialization, assigning the tasks to different agents is efficient. Yet a sufficiently large wage floor...

Typically, workplace discrimination is approached from the perspective of a particular dimension (e.g., race or gender). This offers insight but also obscures important communality among different types of discrimination. We propose a construct of generalized workplace discrimination that...

Non-market organizations always rely on authority, instead of negotiation and exchange, to allocate resources. However, as Arrow (1974) stressed, "Disobedience to orders, organized or unorganized, frequently sets limits to authority." In this paper, we develop a fairness-based obedience theory...

Firms allocate workers to clients to provide services. On the job, workers acquire skills that increase their client-specific productivity and therefore raise the probability that clients poach them. In this paper, we advance the understanding of this important, yet understudied feature of...

The role of the population as a carrier of intellectual potential increases many times in post-industrial countries, where it is the intelligence of the nation as a set of intellects of individuals that becomes the real engine and determining factor of progress. At the same time, along with the...

Projects are embedded in multiple systemic contexts, e.g. organizations, interorganizational networks and organizational fields, which jointly facilitate and constrain project organizing. As projects partly evolve in idiosyncratic ways as temporary systems, embedding needs to be understood as a...

Traditionally, researchers have had difficulty testing the relationship between the degree of risk or uncertainty in workers' environments and incentive pay. The authors employ Prendergast's (2002) theory that incorporates the delegation of worker authority into the principal-agent model to...

We argue that corporate investment decisions depend not only on project characteristics such as expected NPV, but also on how well a firm can assess its managers' human capital. If so, projects pitched by managers about whom the firm has more complete information should be more likely to be...

Companies that try to address inequality in employment face a paradox. Failing to address disparities regarding protected classes in a company’s workforce can result in legal sanctions; but proactive actions to address and avoid such disparities can also face legal scrutiny and sanctions too....

This paper investigates the effects of managerial incentives on favoritism in promotion decisions. First, we theoretically show that favoritism leads to a lower quality of promotion decisions and in turn lower efforts. But the effect can be mitigated by pay-for-performance incentives for...