Top management faces two key organizational design choices: (1) how much authority to delegate to lower-level managers, and (2) how to design incentive compensation to ensure that these managers do not misuse their discretion. Although theoretical accounting literature has emphasized the joint...

In this paper, I extend the organizational design literature by examining how the delegation choice is affected by the ability to resolve the incentive problem caused by this delegation. Based on the seminal papers by Grossman and Hart (1986) and Holmstrom and Milgrom (1994), I argue that the...

This paper intends to contribute to the (bounded rationality) foundations of trust, showing how the concept of trust is related to the basic hypothesis on the behavior of the two people involved. First, I briefly review some definitions of trust found in the literature, and attempt to establish...

We consider a single-principal/multi-agent model to investigate the principal's preferences over delegated contracting. The analysis extends the single-agent/multi-task LEN model in Feltham and Xie (1994) to a multi-agent/multi-task context. We consider full-commitment contracts, i.e., the...

To address agents' moral hazard over effort, incentive contracts impose risk on the agents. As performance measures become noisier, the conventional agency analysis predicts that principals will reduce the incentive weights assigned to such measures. However, prior empirical results (Prendergast...

Numerous (high-tax) countries presume that multinational firms use their transfer-pricing policies to shift profits into countries with lower tax rates. To avoid the corresponding loss in tax revenues, tax authorities develop constantly tightening rules which limit the scope of transfer-price...

We posit that the value of a manager's human capital depends on the firm's business strategy. The resulting interaction between business strategy and managerial incentives affects the organization of business activities, both the internal organization of the firm and the determination of firm...

This paper investigates how information uncertainty, measured through variation in the informativeness of the public information environment, shapes the organizational design choices of firms. I posit that, when faced with higher uncertainty about demand and supply, managers are more likely to...

Economic theory predicts that insiders reveal private information when they trade equity in their firm. However, insider purchases to meet equity holding requirements or sales to satisfy liquidity needs do not reveal private information. We predict that contract terms stipulating CEO equity...

We posit that the value of a manager's human capital depends on the firm's business strategy. The resulting interaction between business strategy and managerial incentives affects the organization of business activities. We illustrate the impact of this interaction on firm boundaries in a...