We analyze the optimal allocation of authority in an organization whose members have conflicting preferences. One party has decision-relevant private information, and the party who obtains authority decides in a self-interested way. As a novel element in the literature on decision rights, we...

In numerous economic scenarios, contracting parties may not have a clear picture of all the relevant aspects. A contracting party may be unaware of what she and/or others are entitled to determine. Therefore, she may reject a contract that is too good to be true. Further, a contracting party may...

In this paper we investigate the implications of providing loan officers with a compensation structure that rewards loan volume and penalizes poor performance versus a fixed wage unrelated to performance. We study detailed transaction information for more than 45,000 loans issued by 240 loan...

We formalize a conception of authority, which is commonly defined as the right of controlling a person's actions embedded in human assets in sociology. Due to the inalienable property of human assets, the contractible formal authority is hard to verify and enforce, while real authority usually...

Work and trade relationships are often governed by relational contracts, in which incentives for cooperative action today stem from the prospective future benefits of the relationship. In this paper, we study how reductions in clarity about the financial consequences of actions, induced by...