This paper argues that the prevalence of compensation systems which reward winners without explicitly identifying losers can be rationalized by workers` concern for relative payoffs. If the workers` participation constraints are binding, the firm must compensate its employees for the disutility...

Scientific knowledge is believed to be the wellspring of innovation. Historically, firms have also invested in research to fuel innovation and growth. In this paper, we document a shift away from scientific research by large corporations between 1980 and 2007. We find that publications by...

This paper studies the optimal allocation of coordination responsibilities in organizations where duplication of effort is a serious concern. The planner`s objective is to minimize a weighted average of the wage bill and the cost of delay. The paper provides conditions under which, in balanced...

This article studies hierarchical organizations where concerns for fast execution are important and employees must be coordinated to avoid wasteful duplications of effort. Simple conditions are provided for the time spent on coordinating subordinates to be increasing and the span of control to...

Contract Theory by Patrick Bolton and Mathias Dewatripont, a comprehensive textbook on contract theory suitable for use at the graduate and advanced undergraduate levels, covers the areas of agency theory, information economics, and organization theory and presents many applications in all areas...

We analyze costly information acquisition and information revelation in groups that evaluate different decision options in a dynamic setting. Even when team members have perfectly aligned interests the group may inefficiently delay decisions due to either insufficient information acquisition...

Using a high-stakes field experiment conducted with a financial brokerage, we implement a novel design to separately identify two channels of social influence in financial decisions, both widely studied theoretically. When someone purchases an asset, his peers may also want to purchase it, both...

It is often suggested that incentive schemes under moral hazard can be gamed by an agent with superior knowledge of the environment, and that deliberate lack of transparency about the incentive scheme can reduce gaming. We formally investigate these arguments. Ambiguous incentive schemes induce...

Using a high‐stakes field experiment conducted with a financial brokerage, we implement a novel design to separately identify two channels of social influence in financial decisions, both widely studied theoretically. When someone purchases an asset, his peers may also want to purchase it,...