We analyze the optimal combination of promotion tournaments and individual performance pay in an employment relationship. An agent's effort is non-observable and he has private information about his suitability for promotion. We find that the principal does not provide individual incentives if...

This paper analyzes a procurement setting with two identical firms and stochastic innovations. In contrast to the previous literature, I show that a procurer who cannot charge entry fees may prefer a fixed-prize tournament to a first-price auction since holding an auction may leave higher rents...

With adverse selection, diseconomies of scale associated with hierarchies may induce the implementation of a second-best technology. This occurs whenever rents to lower tiers of the hierarchy increase faster than total surplus. This is more likely with longer hierarchies.

This paper analyzes the problem of optimal job design when there is only one contractible and imperfect performance measure for all tasks whose contribution to firm value is non-veritable. I find that task splitting is optimal when relational contracts based on firm value are not feasible. By...

In this paper, we provide an outlook for further research on the topic of governance. We review four different approaches on the theory of the firm and discuss implications for governance, namely; nexus of contracts / agency theory, property rights / incomplete contracts, adaptation, and nexus...

We compare the effect of legal and institutional competition for the design of labor institutions in an environment characterized by holdup problems in human and physical capital. We compare autarky with the two country case, assuming that capital is perfectly mobile and labor immobile. We...