This paper studies organizations with autocratic decisionmaking.

Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have long argued that certain decision rights carry not only instrumental value but may also be valuable for their own sake. The ideas of autonomy, freedom, and liberty derive their intuitive appeal-at least partly-from an assumed positive intrinsic...

Authority is modelled as the right to undertake a non-contractible decision in a joint project. We show that the allocation of authority depends on bargaining power and differences in both parties cost functions. The decision-maker is assumed to exert an externality on the other parties. Overall...

In this laboratory experiment we study the use of strategic ignorance to delegate real authority within a firm. A worker can gather information on investment projects, while a manager makes the implementation decision. The manager can monitor the worker. This allows her to better exploit the...

Authority and power permeate political, social, and economic life, but empirical knowledge about the motivational origins and consequences of authority is limited. We study the motivation and incentive effects of authority experimentally in an authority-delegation game. Individuals often retain...

A model is analyzed in which agents exert effort to create innovations within an organization. When payments are infeasible, the decision on the implementation of a proposal is shown to bemadeby simplemonotonic decision rules. A trade-off arises between the use of information and the incentives...

We examine whether legal institutions affect the balance of power between CEOs and shareholders. Particularly, we test to which extent legal rules matter for the extent to which CEOs receive generous pay packages. The study uses a world-widedata set covering 27 countries for the period 1995 to...