It is widely believed that the ideal board in corporations is composed almost entirely of independent (outside) directors. In contrast, this paper shows that some lack of board independence can be in the interest of shareholders. This follows because a lack of board independence serves as a...

In this paper, we consider a dynamic signaling model of an R&D market in which a researcher can choose either a safe project (exploitation) or a risky project (exploration) at each instance. We argue that there are substantial efficiency gains from rewarding minor innovations above their social...