This paper views authority as the right to undertake decisions that impose externalities on other members of the organization. When only decision rights can be contractually assigned to one of the organization's stakeholders, the optimal assignment minimizes the resulting inefficiencies by...

We show experimentally that fairness concerns may have a decisive impact on the actual and optimal choice of contracts in a moral hazard context. Bonus contracts that offer a voluntary and unenforceable bonus for satisfactory performance provide powerful incentives and are superior to explicit...

We present a non-technical account of ambiguity in strategic games and show how it may be applied to economics and social sciences. Optimistic and pessimistic responses to ambiguity are formally modelled. We show that pessimism has the effect of increasing (decreasing) equilibrium prices under...

In the hold-up problem incomplete contracts cause the proceeds of relation-specific investments to be allocated by ex-post bargaining. The present paper investigates the efficiency of incomplete contracts if individuals have heterogeneous preferences implying heterogeneous bargaining behavior...

In this paper we analyze the frequently observed phenomenon that (i) some members of a team ('black sheep') exhibit behavior disliked by other (honest) team members, who (ii) nevertheless refrain from reporting such misbehavior to the authorities (they set up a 'wall of silence'). Much cited...

We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A judicious definition of status categories can be used by a principal in order to influence the agents' performance. We first consider a pure status case where there...

In a principal-agent model with hidden information and no monetary transfers, I establish the Veto-Power Principle: any incentive-compatible outcome can be implemented through veto-based delegation with an endogenously chosen default decision. This result demonstrates the exact nature of...

We propose a speculative attack model in which agents receive multiple public signals. It is characterised by its focus on an informational structure which sets free from the strict separation between public information and private information. Diverse pieces of public information can be taken...

Measuring risk aversion is sensitive to assumptions about the wealth in subjects' utility functions. Data from the same subjects in low- and high-stake lottery decisions allow estimating the wealth in a pre-specified one-parameter utility function simultaneously with risk aversion. This paper...