This paper assesses different organizational forms in terms of their ability to generate information about investment projects and allocate capital to these projects efficiently. A decentralized approach with small, single-manager firms is most likely to be attractive when information about...

A fundamental problem entrepreneurs face in the formative stages of their businesses is how to provide incentives for employees to protect, rather than steal, the source of organizational rents. We study how the entrepreneur's response to this problem will determine the organization's internal...

Cooperative behavior as well as other cultural rules and values are made explicit in organizational units that procure and provide a common service. The common service is procured by a club, which consists of a user-value function, a representation governance, and a budgetallocation function....

We use administrative personnel records of a large British financial sector employer to investigate how workers' behaviour responds to remuneration differences and 'luck' in the promotion system. The main methodological innovation is the use of the early part of a panel dataset to construct an...

This paper examines interactions between self-interested agents in a two-tier government hierarchy, consisting of a central authority and bureaucrats in a two-stage game, where the actions of agents affect private sector allocations. Conditions under which lower-tier corruption arises as an...

This paper studies how communication allows for the specialized acquisition of knowledge. It shows that a knowledge-based hierarchy is a natural way to organize the acquisition of knowledge when matching problems with those who know how to solve them is costly. In such an organization,...

Recent conceptualizations of trends in the structure of U.S. industry have focused on the relative importance of markets, hierarchies, and hybrid intermediate forms. This paper seeks to advance the discussion by distinguishing three ideal-typical forms of organization and their corresponding key...

Die Diskussion über eine Reform der nordrhein-westfälischen Mittelbehörden ist in vollem Gange. Verwaltungsmodernisierung sollte allerdings nicht auf betriebswirtschaftliche Aspekte reduziert werden. Sie muss sich auch an wirtschaftlichen, politischen und gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen...

We develop a model of hierarchies based on the allocation of authority. A firm's owners have ultimate authority over a firm's decisions, but they have limited time or capacity to exercise this authority. Hence owners must delegate authority to subordinates. However, these subordinates also have...