A principal provides budgets to agents (e.g., divisions of a firm or the principal's children) whose expenditures provide her benefits, either materially or because of altruism. Only agents know their potential to generate benefits. We prove that if the more "productive" agents are also more...

A principal provides budgets to agents (e.g., divisions of a firm or the principal’s children) whose expenditures provide her benefits, either materially or because of altruism. Only agents know their potential to generate benefits. We prove that if the more “productive” agents are also...

Can managers' personality traits be of use to profit maximizing firm owners? We investigate the case where managers have a variety of attitudes toward relative performance that are indexed by their type. We consider two stage games where profit maximizing owners select managers in the first...

We study the quality choices of institutional health-care providers, such as hospitals, assuming that the utility function of the key organizational decision maker includes both quality of care and financial surplus. We are primarily concerned with how changes in outside claims—particularly...

Firms can approach advertising competition either by setting advertising budgets (as in the percentage of sales method) or target sales levels (as in the objective and task approach). We study firms’ incentives to adopt one or the other posture using a two-stage model of duopolistic...

Many recommendation and decision processes depend on eliciting evaluations of opportunities, products, and vendors. A scoring system is devised that induces honest reporting of feedback. Each rater merely reports a signal, and the system applies proper scoring rules to the implied posterior...

"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. Many developing countries use food-price subsidies or price controls to improve the nutrition of the poor. However, subsidizing goods on...

"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. President Obama's health insurance reform efforts, as embodied in the bills passed by the House and Senate in late 2009 and signed into...