We consider the trade-off between imperfect control and communication in organizations. A principal anticipates receiving private information and hires an agent to take an action for her. She has the ability to contractually tie the agent's action to the state, but this control is incomplete....

Purpose: The purpose is to understand why contract instability occurs when small landowners lease their land to large landholders. Design/methodology/approach: The authors develop a contract theoretical model to understand the stability problem in the farmland lease contract in China, where...

We study strategic communication between a Sender and Receiver who are both uncertain about their preferred actions. The Sender observes noisy signals about both players' ideal policies and then communicates with the Receiver. Even though Sender and Receiver disagree about ideal policies as a...

We study strategic information transmission in a Sender-Receiver game where players' optimal actions depend on the realization of multiple signals but the players disagree on the relative importance of each piece of news. We characterize a statistical environment - featuring symmetric loss...

This paper analyzes truthtelling incentives in pre-vote communication in heterogeneous committees. We generalize the classical Condorcet jury model by introducing a new informational structure that captures consistency of information. In contrast to the impossibility result shown by Coughlan...

Two divisions of a firm, overarched by a headquarters, are engaged in a decision problem. Division one obtains information and informs division two who has the formal authority to make the decision. Headquarters guides the decision process by affecting the quality of information that division...

We analyze a new type of bandit where an agent is confronted with two-dimensional uncertainty. The agent does not know whether ability or effort is required to succeed at a given task. Moreover, the agent does not know her own ability level. In each period, after deciding whether to exert effort...