We consider a principal-agent model where the agent is hired to take an action on behalf of the principal. The agent can exert costly effort to learn the true state of the world. If he fails to discover the state, he can end an inquiry to the principal who then can exert (additional) costly...

Economic Value Added is a new measure of performance that is purported to better align managers' incentives to that of the shareholders. Accordingly, firms that experience higher agency conflicts should be more included to use this performance evaluation system. Additionally, the organizational...

Action learning programs do not always seem to lead to organizational growth. Two of the reasons why this may happen, differences in perspectives and hold-up situations, are therefore contained in a flexible mathematical model that serves descriptive purposes. Studying this model brings us to...

In this paper, we investigate the role of financial incentives and social incentives in multi-task settings where the agent makes an effort level choice and an effort allocation choice. We focus on a setting where these choices are not independent and an active trade-off between effort level and...

We posit that the value of a manager's human capital depends on the firm's business strategy. The resulting interaction between business strategy and managerial incentives affects the organization of business activities. We illustrate the impact of this interaction on firm boundaries in a...

Control in organizations can be defined as expectational equilibrium, or correspondence between how the members of an organization behave and how others expect them to behave. Using a contract model of organizations as the base, we use human expectations, common knowledge, and culture to propose...

Agents may propose bad projects because they unwittingly rely on defective prior knowledge. Concern about these honest mistakes encourages principals to examine track records of the agents' use of the same prior knowledge. But, such track records cannot exist for novel projects (or routine...

Strategic cost management is the deliberate alignment of a firm's resources and associated cost structure with long-term strategy and short-term tactics. Although managers continue to pursue efficiency and effectiveness within the firm, increasingly, improvements are obtained across the value...

Strategic cost management is the deliberate alignment of a firm's resources and associated cost structure with long-term strategy and short-term tactics. Although managers continue to pursue efficiency and effectiveness within the firm, increasingly, improvements are obtained across the value...