This paper is about the corporate structure, the organizational structure, and the financial structure of firms, and how they relate to each other. We show that separation of ownership and control may arise as a response to overload costs, although it involves agency costs, and that...

This paper offers a rationale for limiting the delegation of (real) authority, which neither relies on insurance arguments nor depends on ownership structure. We analyse a repeated hidden action model in which the actions of a risk neutral agent determine his future outside option. Consequently,...

We develop an equilibrium model of industrial structure in which the organization of firms is endogenous. Differentiated consumer products can be produced either by vertically integrated firms or by pairs of specialized companies. Production of each variety of consumer good requires a unique,...

Recent years have witnessed an enormous amount of reorganization of the corporate sector in the US and in Europe. This paper examines the role of market competition for this trend in corporate reorganization. We find that at intermediate levels of competition the CEO of the corporation decides...

Globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities and as the emergence of human capital as the new stakeholder of the firm. This paper surveys recent work which examines the role of trade integration for these changes in corporate organization. More...

In this work we analyze the characteristics and dynamics of organizations wherein members diverge in terms of capabilities and visions they hold, and interests which they pursue. How does society put together such distributed and possibly coflicting knowledge? The question is "Hayekian" in its...

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...

We model a firm in an institutional market setting, consisting of a production technology and its governance. The governance consists of a hierarchical firm structure, a cost efficiency parameter,and an internal pay system. The depth of the firm is determined by profit maximization under the...

We consider a hierarchical organization with two fully rational agents. The goal of the organization is that of selecting the best alternative out of several available, and agents are heterogenous in the accuracy with which they screen the alternatives. We show that, if internal communications...