We study a firm in which the marginal productivity of agents' effort increases with the effort of others. We show that the presence of an agent who overestimates his marginal productivity may make all agents better off, including the biased agent himself. This Pareto improvement is obtained even...

Several finance and economics problems involve a team of agents in which the marginal productivity of any one agent increases with the effort of others on the team. Because the effort of each agent is not observable to any other agents, the performance of the team is negatively affected by a...

The paper provides an empirical investigation of directors' ownership in the mutual fund industry. Our results show that, contrary to anecdotal evidence, a significant portion of directors hold shares in the funds they oversee. Moreover, ownership patterns are broadly consistent with the an...