This paper studies hierarchical organizations where concerns for fast execution are important and employees must be coordinated to avoid wasteful duplications of effort. Simple conditions are provided for the time spent on coordinating subordinates to be increasing and the span of control to be...

This research examines the effects of three defining features of bureaucratic organizations—hierarchy, centralization of decision making, and the formalization of administrative procedures and rules—on the fiscal health of city governments in the U.S. It utilizes data from a national survey...

While existing studies usually model promotion as a bilateral interaction between promoter and promotee, it is not uncommon that the promoter is under the influence of a third-party. For instance, authoritarian rulers may consider how their interactions with local agents change the way that...

Traders differ in speed and their speed differences matter. I model strategic interactions induced when high frequency traders (HFTs) have different speeds in an extended Kyle (1985) framework. HFTs are assumed to anticipate incoming orders and trade rapidly to exploit normal-speed traders'...

We study optimal promotion decisions of hierarchical firms, with one junior and one senior managerial position, which interact in a search and matching labor market. Workers acquire experience over time while being employed in a junior position and the firm has to determine the experience level...

We analyze a model of hierarchies in organizations where neither decisions themselves nor the delegation of decisions are contractible, and where power-hungry agents derive a private benefit from making decisions. Two distinct agency problems arise and interact: Subordinates take more biased...

Over the past several decades, technological advancements in information technology and data science have increasingly enabled firms to produce and distribute information, which challenges long-standing ideas about the role of managerial reporting in firms. We design a series of laboratory...

The information that public officials use to make decisions determines the distribution of public resources and the efficacy of public policy. This paper develops a measurement framework for assessing the accuracy of a set of fundamental bureaucratic beliefs and provides experimental evidence on...

We investigate overlapping contests in multi-divisional organizations in which an individual's effort simultaneously determines the outcome of several contests on different hierarchical levels. We show that individuals in larger units are disadvantaged in the grand (organization-wide) contest...