A firm typically assigns multiple tasks it must perform to either internal employees or outside vendors. This paper demonstrates the need to integrate a task assignment decision with the design of a managerial control system as each affects the other. An internal employee is distinguished from...

This paper studies two disclosure regimes when a firm with superior private information must rely on a strategic certifier to disclose credibly its prospects. In the ex ante (ex post) disclosure regime, the firm must decide on whether to hire the certifier before (after) observing the...

This paper studies when a firm will acquire additional information about a potential new project by consulting outsiders, when doing so runs the risk of reducing the value of implementing the project as a consequence of information leakage. The analysis evaluates the firm's information...

In an agency setting where the agent must be compensated both to exert effort to produce a new project and to announce honestly when the new project has been produced, we show that Holmstrom's (1979) well-known "informativeness criterion" does not, by itself, determine whether a variable is...

This paper demonstrates the existence of two different kinds of externalities induced by an auditor servicing multiple clients at the same time. First, we show that the capital market price for a client can increase in the number of qualified reports that his auditor issues to his other clients,...