Many organizations attempt to manage agency problems not with incentive contracts but by keeping the principal involved in the decision process, that is, by limiting delegation. This paper develops a model to investigate the economics of several decision processes that are commonly used to set...

Many organizations attempt to manage agency problems not with incentive contracts but by keeping the principal involved in the decision process, that is, by limiting delegation. This paper develops a model to investigate the economics of several decision processes that are commonly used to set...

This paper reconciles three pronounced trends in U.S. corporate governance: the increase in pay levels for top executives, the increasing prevalence of appointing CEOs through external hiring rather than internal promotions, and the increased prevalence of hiring outside CEOs with prior...

Work-related perks, such as corporate jets, nice offices, and so forth, improve the tradeoff between incentives and insurance that determines the optimal incentive contract. We show that (i) such perks may be offered even if their direct consumption benefits are offset by their costs; (ii) they...

We examine how firms can use employee discounts and perks to extract information rents from employees who have private information about their preferences and outside opportunities. The firm creates different bundles of the perk and salary in response to different employee characteristics and...

We analyze whether ease and speed of entry can mitigate the anti-competititve effects of a merger, in a dynamic model of endogenous merger. In our model, if new firms can enter quickly, it is more likely that merger is motivated by efficiency as opposed to increased market power. Thus, there is...

Invoking the free-rider problem in teams, many observers find profit sharing in large organizations puzzling, because it should have negligible incentive effects. We show that if a firm can be decomposed into two separate teams whose outputs can be observed, then profit sharing combined with...

New government spending must be approved by a referendum of citizens in many Swiss cantons. This decisionmaking procedure seems like a simple way to address citizen-legislator agency problems, but little systematic evidence is available concerning its effect on spending outcomes. We estimate...