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...

A hierarchically structured rent-seeking contest may be associated with lower equilibrium expenditure than a corresponding flat contest. In this chapter we discuss how this fact may be used to explain the structure of organizations such as firms, including why firms commonly have outside owners.

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...

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...