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...

In this paper we focus on restrictions arising from the players belonging to some hierarchical structure that is represented by a digraph. Two of these models are the games with a permission structure and games under precedence constraints. In both cases, the hierarchy can be represented by a...

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...

Nowadays, it is commonplace to claim that the economy overuses our limited material and energy resources and that this overuse threatens both human society and the biosphere. Other than anti-science cranks, the only ones who seem to deny this claim are mainstream economists. In our view, though,...

This paper combines theories of organizational design with theories of production to provide a novel perspective, which helps explain the technological forces that led to the rise of vertically integrated "modern" corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I describe the...

The notion of organizational hierarchy is disputed, also in view of the rise of new organizational forms claimed to have "hierarchies without bosses." To better understand the contested nature of hierarchy, this essay provides a systemic perspective on organizational hierarchy defined as a...