Agency theory suggests that high pay-performance sensitivity (PPS) of CEO's compensation is an important motivation mechanism to the CEO to improve corporate performance. We develop a simple model that suggests that reverse causality should also be considered. Specifically, our model predicts...

The debate on employee representation on corporate boards has received considerable attention from scholars and politicians around the world. We provide new insights to this ongoing discussion by applying power indices from game theory to examine the actual voting power of employees on boards...

Recent revisionist accounts of corporate governance in both business history and finance are challenging the tradition narrative, associated with Berle and Means (1932) and Chandler (1977), in which the American model of diffuse ownership and coherent diversification is both an inevitable...

Several studies show that evolution favors non-selfish preferences only if preference types are observable. We present a new evolutionary scenario applied to the Centipede Game, where we adopt self-confirming equilibrium to capture behavior. We show that altruism may be evolutionarily successful...

We explore the extent to which altruism, as measured by giving in a dictator game (DG), accounts for play in a noisy version of the repeated prisoner's dilemma. We find that DG giving is correlated with cooperation in the repeated game when no cooperative equilibria exist, but not when...

We study the process of equilibrium selection in games when players have social preferences of the type discussed, among others, by Rabin (1993) and Segal and Sobel (2007). To this end, we employ a standard noisy version of the best response dynamics. We obtain several results concerning some...

As one of the best-known examples of the paradox of backward induction, centipede games have prompted a host of studies with various approaches and explanations (McKelvey and Palfrey, 1992; Fey et al., 1996; Nagel and Tang, 1998; Rapoport et al., 2003; Palacios-Huerta and Volij, 2009). Focusing on initial plays...