Sometimes a group of people want to hire some agent (a monetary authority, for instance) to force them to cooperate with one another. This can cause problems, not only of the standard principal-agent type, but also of inconsistency, which appears here as renegotiation. The group faces a conflict...

Henry Bienen and Nicolas van de Walle, Of Time and Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Copyright 1992 Blackwell Publishers Ltd..

Many organizations operate by majority rule. Why? I consider elections as ways to aggregate information rather than ways to reconcile preferences. This is a principal-agent problem with many principals. Copyright 1990 Blackwell Publishers Ltd..