Many economic organizations have some relational structure, meaning that economic agents do not only differ with respect to certain individual characteristics such as wealth and preferences, but also belong to some relational structure in which they usually take different positions. Two examples...

Power is a core concept in the analysis and design of organizations. One of the problems with the extant literature on positional power in hierarchies is that it is mainly restricted to the analysis of power in terms of the bare positions of the actors. While such an analysis informs us about...

Recently, applications of cooperative game theory to economic allocation problems have gained popularity. In many of these problems, players are organized according to either a hierarchical structure or a levels structure that restrict players ́possibilities to cooperate. In this paper, we...

In most firms, if not all, workers are divided asymmetrically in terms of authority and responsibility. In this paper, we view the asymmetric allocations of authority and responsibility as essential features of hierarchy and examine why hierarchies often prevail in organizations from that...

Agents participating in different kind of organizations, usually take different positions in some network structure. Two well-known network structures are hierarchies and communication networks. We give an overview of the most common models of communication and hierarchy restrictions in...

We consider a bandit problem faced by a team of two heterogeneous players. The team is hierarchical in that one (the principal) retains the exclusive right to terminate the project while the other (the agent) focuses strictly on implementing the project assigned to him. As a key departure, we...

In this paper we consider the problem of the control of access to a firm's productive asset, embedding the relevant decisionmakers into a general structure of formal authority relations. Within such an authority structure, each decision maker acts as a principal to some decision makers, while...