Introduction: the study of corporate governance / Benjamin E. Hermalin, Michael S. Weisbach -- Aspects of the economics of organization with application to corporate governance / Benjamin E. Hermalin -- Assessing managerial ability: implications for corporate governance / Benjamin E. Hermalin,...

We consider a heretofore unexplored explanation for why platforms, such as Internet service providers, might impose download limits on content consumers: doing so increases the degree to which those consumers view content providers’ products as substitutes. This, in turn, intensifies...

Charisma is seen as a generally positive attribute for a leader to possess, yet many studies give it a "mixed report card": finding it can have little or no effect, or worse a negative effect. This paper develops a model to explain why. The key insight is that presenting the cold hard truth is...

We consider a heretofore unexplored explanation for why platforms, such as Internet service providers and mobile-phone networks, offer plans with download limits: through one of two mechanisms, doing so causes the providers of the content consumer purchase to either reduce their prices or...

Pricing of Internet access has been characterized by two properties: Parties are directly billed only by the Internet service provider (ISP) through which they connect to the Internet. Pricing, moreover, is not contingent on the type of content being transmitted. These properties define a regime...

This paper studies the ability of an agent and a principal to achieve the first-best outcome when the agent invests in an asset that has greater value if owned by the principal than by the agent. When contracts can be renegotiated, a well-known danger is that the principal can holdup the agent,...

This paper builds on the model of leadership set forth by Hermalin ("Toward an Economic Theory of Leadership: Leading by Example," American Economic Review, forthcoming). A criticism of that earlier work is that it considers leadership in a static setting only. Yet an important phenomenon of...

In systems industries, combinations of components are consumed together to generate user benefits. Arrangements among component providers sometimes limit consumers’ ability to mix and match components, and such exclusive arrangements have been highly controversial. We examine the competitive...

We examine the welfare effects of product-line restrictions, such as those called for by some proponents of network neutrality regulation. We consider a platform that brings together households and application providers. We find that restricting a monopoly platform to a single product has the...