We develop a theory of delegation within organizations where agents are privately informed about whether they should be engaged in exploitation or in exploration activities. Excessive delegation lead agents to inefficiently herd into exploration in an attempt to boost their market value. The...

We use a linear contracting framework to study how the relation between performance measures used in an agent's incentive contract and the agent's private pre-decision information affects the value of delegating decision rights to the agent. The analysis relies on the idea that available...

Although Holmstrom's informativeness criterion provides a theoretical foundation for the controllability principle and interfirm relative performance evaluation, empirical and field studies provide only weak evidence on such practices. This paper refines the traditional informativeness criterion...

We use a model of information asymmetry and rent seeking to understand why management control becomes easier when a firm makes improvements that are translated into increasing sales. We show that increases in market share can lead to better information sharing if (1) workers make continuous...

It is often claimed that (i) managers work too hard on operational issues and do not spend enough effort on strategic activities, and (ii) something can be done about this by introducing nonfinancial performance measures as for instance with a balanced scorecard. We give an explanation for both...

It is often claimed that (i) managers work too hard on operational issues and spend not enough effort on strategic activities and (ii) something can be done about this by introducing nonfinancial performance measures as for instance with a balanced scorecard. We give an explanation for both...

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 investigates whether paying higher wages motivates employees to provide higher effort and whether firm profit moderates this relation. Consistent with gift exchange (Akerlof 1982) and reciprocity (Rabin 1993) models, my experimental results show that workers provided more effort when...

We model career concerns in a regime where a linear incentive contract includes a mix of a publicly observed performance measure and a second, correlated, private measure that is not observed by the labor market. Under this quot;mixquot; regime, we find that agent effort and total agency payoff...