Abstract The internal organization of large firms as well as procurement and regulation contexts frequently involve a hierarchical nexus of contracts, with substantial delegation of decision making across layers. Such hierarchical delegation of decision making creates problems of aligning...

The internal organization of large firms as well as procurement and regulation contexts frequently involve a hierarchical nexus of contracts, with substantial delegation of decision making across layers. Such hierarchical delegation of decision making creates problems of aligning incentives of...

This paper studies an agency framework in which a principal hires a supervisor to monitor the agent's productive effort. We consider several monitoring technologies which differ in the quantity (frequency) and the quality (accuracy) of the information they deliver. We show that the frequency of...

In situations of imperfect testing and communication, as suggested by Sah and Stiglitz (AER, 1986), organizational forms can be identified with different rules of aggregating evaluations of individual screening units. In this paper, we discuss the relative merits of polyarchical organizations...

If managers and their subordinates had the same basic qualifications, organizations could benefit from replacing unproductive superiors with more productive subordinates. This threat of being replaced, however, could give rise to strategic recruiting: Unproductive superiors might deliberately...

Congress uses varying degrees of specificity when passing legislation. Sometimes it writes very detailed, exacting laws; other times it leaves these details to implementing agencies. A natural positive question then arises: what factors are critical for understanding the degree of delegation...

One approach to representing knowledge or belief of agents, used by economists and computer scientists, involves an infinite hierarchy of beliefs. Such a hierarchy consists of an agent's beliefs about the state of the world, his beliefs about other agents' beliefs about the world, his beliefs...

Since at least the Tavistock studies, the need to improve communication and coordination in the construction process has been stressed. This paper reports from a study of 25 construction projects where QA and a number of procedures were in use which might have been expected to bring such...

This paper summarizes some of the problems associated with the generation of higher order emergent structures in formal dynamical systems as well as some of the formal properties of dynamical systems capable of generating higher order structures.