In most firms, if not all, workers are divided asymmetrically in terms of authority and responsibility. In this paper, we view the asymmetric allocations of authority and responsibility as essential features of hierarchy and examine why hierarchies often prevail in organizations from that...

This paper explores the consequences of cognitive dissonance, coupled with timeinconsistent preferences, in an intertemporal decision problem with two distinct goals: acting decisively on early information (vision) and adjusting flexibly to late information (flexibility). The decision maker...

In many facets of life, we often face competition with a multilayered structure in which different levels of competition take place simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a new class of tournament models, called multilayered tournaments, to capture this type of competitive environment. Among...

In most firms, if not all, workers are divided asymmetrically in terms of authority and responsibility. In this paper, we view the asymmetric allocations of authority and responsibility as essential features of hierarchy and examine why hierarchies often prevail in organizations from that...

This paper provides a simple autonomy-based model of human motivation in which a decision maker with divided selves must perform some task. The key presumption of the model is that the brain is not a unitary system which is equipped to achieve a single goal in a systematicmanner; rather, it...

This paper explores the consequences of sabotage for the design of incentive contracts. The possibility of sabotage gives rise to a dynamic concern, similar to the Ratchet effect, which distorts the agents' incentives. We first show that the mere possibility of sabotage may make it impossible to...

This paper explores the consequences and implications of the "dual role of promotion" in an environment where a firm must simultaneously achieve two distinct goals - assignment and incentive provision - via the strategic use of promotions. We argue that the efficient promotion rule is generally...

The class of double-crossing preferences, where signaling is cheaper for higher types than for lower types at low signaling levels and the opposite is true at high signaling levels, underlines the phenomenon of countersignaling. We show that under the D1 refinement, the equilibrium signaling...

Despite widespread use in online transactions, rating systems only provide summary statistics of buyers' diverse opinions at best. To investigate the consequences of this coarse form of information aggregation, we consider a dynamic lemons market in which buyers share their evaluations...

We study a signaling game where agents signal their type by choosing when to quit pursuing an uncertain project. High types observe news about project quality and quit when bad news arrives. This creates opportunities for low types who do not observe any news to mimic high types by quitting...