We model the determinants of who makes decisions, the principal or an agent, when there are multiple decisions. Decision making takes effort and time; and, once implemented, the expected loss from a particular decision (or project) increases with the length of time since the last decision was...

We examine decentralization -- that is, the use of more than one decision maker -- in small- to medium-sized organizations, with a particular focus on family firms. Our estimation results suggest that larger firms decentralize more often, as do firms with newer owners, organizations with a...

Taking into account that it is in the nature of the modern corporat ion that risks are distributed over several agents, we discuss in this paper the organisational behaviour as it results from such dispersal of responsibilities for both the principal and the agent. We explore the hypothesis that...

Cooperation among firms is governed by contracts. An interesting phenomenon is that some contracts are comprehensive while some are limited. This study tries to explain different levels of incompleteness of contracts that firms choose to govern their cooperation with. We find that a limited...

Organizational citizenship behavior is a highly sought-after outcome. We integrate insight from the psychological ownership perspective and agency theory to examine how the juxtaposition of informal psychological mechanisms (i.e., ownership feelings toward an organization) and formal and...

This conference paper suggests that the problem of corporate ethics cannot be reduced to the autonomous person. Although the greatest influence on action and choice is one's moral constitution, it does not follow that the agent's behavior is the same within or without the firm. Ethics is a...

Complementarity between performance pay and other organizational design elements has been argued to be one potential explanation for stark differences in the observed productivity gains from performance pay adoption. Using detailed data on internal organization for a nationally representative...

In this paper we examine the internal economic organization of the peculium servi communis as separate business assets granted to a slave and its (external) relationships with creditors. Literary, legal and epigraphic evidence points predominantly to businesses of small or medium size,...

Agency problems in inter-firm trading relationships are severe in developing and transitional economies because of the limited decentralized information that can support contract enforcement and because the timing of intermediate goods production and payment differ. We derive the consequences...

Co-sourcing is a new type of inter-organizational relationship, that is broader, both in operational scope and in risk sharing, than traditional outsourcing relationships. Based on a number of case studies, we develop analytical models of co-sourcing which evaluate when it is optimal, and what...