We investigate a team setting in which workers have different degrees of commitment to the outcome of their work. We show that if there are complementarities in production and if the team manager has some information about team members, interventions that the manager undertakes in order to...

Using a tried and tested measure of management practices which has been shown to predict firm performance, we survey nearly 250 departments across 100+ UK universities. We find large differences in management scores across universities and that departments in older, research-intensive...

We study a two-period moral hazard problem with risk-neutral and wealth-constrained agents and three identical tasks. We show that the allocation of tasks over time is important if there is a capacity constraint on the number of tasks that can be performed in one period. We characterize the...

This paper studies gender interactions within hierarchical organizations using a large data set on the duration of Italian municipal governments elected between 1993 and 2003. A municipal government can be viewed as a hierarchy, whose stability over time depends on the degree of cooperation...

What determines the quality of entrepreneurs? To address this question, the paper proposes a simple model of the interaction between individual workers’ decision to become entrepreneurs and established firms’ effort to keep their best workers and ideas. The main prediction from the model is...

Since Adam Smith's time, the division of labour in production has increased significantly, while information processing has become an important part of work. This paper examines whether the need to coordinate an increasingly complex division of labour has raised the demand for clerical office...

A principal contracts with agents who have diverse abilities to forecast changes in their future tastes. While the principal knows that the agent’s tastes are changing, the agent believes that with probability ?, their future preferences will be identical to their present preferences. The...

Trading in futures markets has grown substantially for many commodities. At the same time the power of many dominant producers has weakened and core prices have tended to fall towards those on the fringe. Existing cartel/fringe models fail to explain the difference between core and fringe prices...

We develop and estimate a model of dynamic interactions where commitment is limited and contracts are incomplete to explain the patterns of income and consumption growth in village economies of less developed countries. Households can insure through both formal contracts and informal agreements,...

We study a contracting model with unforeseen contingencies in which the court is an active player. Ex-ante, the contracting parties cannot include the risky unforeseen contingencies in the contract they draw up. Ex-post the court observes whether an unforeseen contingency occurred, and decides...