This paper empirically investigates how the level of authority delegation is related to the performance of an organization. Decentralized, horizontal organizational structure takes advantage of more efficient decision making, mainly due to more efficient use of "soft" information. The cost of...

We consider a single-principal/multi-agent model to investigate the principal's preferences over delegated contracting. The analysis extends the single-agent/multi-task LEN model in Feltham and Xie (1994) to a multi-agent/multi-task context. We consider full-commitment contracts, i.e., the...

In a setting in which corporate headquarters dictates total sales targets, we study how supervisors allocate sales targets to individual stores. Specifically, we analyze whether supervisors strategically use discretion in the target-setting process to address compensation contracting issues. We...

This study explores how the determinants of financial, nonfinancial and behavioural controls vary in foreign subsidiary manager performance evaluations. Possible impacts of the following factors are analyzed: extent of geographical dispersion, decentralization and perceived environmental...

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...

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...

Recruitment is often delegated to senior employees. Delegated recruitment, however, is vulnerable to moral hazard because senior employees may avoid recruiting the best candidates who could threaten their future seniority. We find that seniors will not deliberately choose bad candidates if the...

Using a unique employee-establishment matched survey, we find a causal relationship between an individual employee's trust of management and the delegation of real authority. We utilize both fixed effects and instrumental variables to control for unobserved factors: establishment-level fixed...