Budgeting and Hierarchical Control.

This paper develops a model of budgeting in hierarchical organizations. Each agent (manager) in the hierarchy receives a budget for a task; based on his own information, the agent assigns tasks and budgets to his subordinates, who, in turn, do the same for their subordinates and so forth. Each department's performance is measured by the difference between budgeted and actual cost. In this setting we show that a particular budget mechanism is optimal in terms of the incentives it creates and the coordination it achieves.