To remain competitive, an organization must both respond to information about its environment and coordinate its activities. We analyse how the allocation of decision rights within an organizational hierarchy influences the organization's ability to solve such problems of coordinated adaptation...

We use a simple agency model to clarify and characterize the various avenues through which changes in the level of uncertainty impact the optimal strength of linear incentives. Instead of attempting to characterize different "types" of uncertainty, which has been the approach in the literature...

I investigate the link between a firm's operating environment and its preferred organizational structure, as determined by the allocation of decision rights, the compensation structure of its managers, and the underlying configuration of its productive assets. The results are broadly consistent...

I analyze a problem of project selection where two agents, privately informed of both the true value and their bias in favor of their alternatives, make non-verifiable proposals to an uninformed decision-maker. The analysis makes two contributions. First, I examine the consequences of preference...

I analyze the impact of managerial involvement and the allocation of authority on employee initiative in a setting where both a manager and an employee can originate new ideas for implementation. I show that employee initiative is maximized through the combination of formal authority and limited...

We analyze a class of sender-receiver games with quadratic payoffs, which includes the communication games in Alonso, Dessein and Matouschek (2008) and Rantakari (2008) as special cases, for which the receiver's maximum expected payoff when players have access to arbitrary, mediated...

A team must select among competing projects that differ in their payoff consequences for its members. Each agent chooses a project and exerts costly effort affecting its random completion time. When one or more projects are complete, agents bargain over which one to implement. A consensus...