We provide a new rationale for the use of discretionary bonuses. In a setting with unknown match qualities between a worker and a firm and subjective evaluations by the principal, bonuses are useful in order to make the feedback from the firm to the workers credible. This way workers in good...

We study dynamic bargaining with private information and a deadline. As commitment power disappears, there is a clear "deadline effect." That is, trade takes place smoothly before the deadline and with an atom right at the deadline. Prices, timing of trade, and the deadline effect respond to the...

Large companies are usually organized into business units, yet some activities are almost always centralized in a company-wide functional unit. We first show that organizations endogenously create an incentive conflict between functional managers (who desire excessive standardization) and...