Authority is modelled as the right to undertake a non-contractible decision in a joint project. We show that the allocation of authority depends on bargaining power and differences in both parties cost functions. The decision-maker is assumed to exert an externality on the other parties. Overall...

Relational contracts - informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships - are integral parts of global production processes. This paper develops a repeated-game model of global sourcing in which final goods producers decide whether to engage with their suppliers in relational...

We document that the speed of information dissemination within mutual fund families positively affects the performance of member funds. This suggests that the resulting benefits of higher information precision far outweigh free-riding costs associated with fast internal dissemination. The...

When procurement contracts are incomplete, they are frequently changed after the contract is awarded to the lowest bidder. This results in a final cost that differs from the initial price, and may involve significant transaction costs due to renegotiation. We propose a stylized model of bidding...

There are more and more industries in which firms are specialized in the production of a component of the final good. This is especially true in high-tech industries. The basic question is why don't these firms merge ? We paradoxically show that industries which are typical candidates for...

A hierarchically structured rent-seeking contest may be associated with lower equilibrium expenditure than a corresponding flat contest. In this chapter we discuss how this fact may be used to explain the structure of organizations such as firms, including why firms commonly have outside owners.

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...

In this paper we want to analyze the internal divisional structure within an organi-zation in the framework of incomplete contract theory. We use the framework of Aghionand Tirole (1997) and define the managerial control structure as sequence of search.A key feature of this paper which...