This paper argues that the prevalence of compensation systems which reward winners without explicitly identifying losers can be rationalized by workers` concern for relative payoffs. If the workers` participation constraints are binding, the firm must compensate its employees for the disutility...

This paper shows that introducing status concerns into a tournament model has substantial implications for the provision of incentives. We emphasize the role of reference groups and determine the optimal number of winners and losers in tournaments. To compensate employees for the disutility of...

This paper studies the optimal allocation of coordination responsibilities in organizations where duplication of effort is a serious concern. The planner`s objective is to minimize a weighted average of the wage bill and the cost of delay. The paper provides conditions under which, in balanced...

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...

Policymakers often motivate their decisions by disclosing information. While this can help hold the government to account, it may also give incumbents an incentive to 'fix the evidence' around their preferred policy. This paper studies how different disclosure rules and the degree of...

Limited liability is a key attribute of the corporate form and one of the most important institutional innovations of the nineteenth century. However, when the owner of a corporation is another corporation as in many corporate groups, an important justification for limited liability—to protect...

This paper examines the relationship between strategic decision-making at the subsidiary level and organization structure. In many organizations, the interaction between central headquarters and subsidiaries is mediated by the presence of intermediate organizational units. Building on the...

Academics, the media, and policymakers have all raised concerns about the implications of human workers being replaced by machines or software. Few have discussed the implications of the reverse: firms' ability to replace capital with workers. We show that this flexibility can help new firms...