A hierarchically structured rent-seeking contest may be associated with lower equilibrium expenditure than a corresponding flat contest. In this chapter we discuss how this fact may be used to explain the structure of organizations such as firms, including why firms commonly have outside owners.

A hierarchically structured rent-seeking contest may be associated with lower equilibrium expenditure than a corresponding flat contest. In this chapter we discuss how this fact may be used to explain the structure of organizations such as firms, including why firms commonly have outside owners.

This paper identifies the pertinent institutions governing the structure of payoffs with regard to female career progression. Drawing on recent insights in behavioral economics, we hypothesize that interactions between psychological mechanisms and the institutional setup may be important...

Within most organizations, agents may spend time on a variety of tasks, productive and redistributive. In this paper, I derive an optimal multi-task incentive scheme under the realistic assumption that agents have limited liability. The wage level is shown to increase with an agent's discretion...

If contracting within the firm is incomplete, managers will expend resources on trying to appropriate a share of the surplus that is generated. We show that outside ownership may alleviate the deadweight losses associated with such costly distributional conflict, even if all it does is add...

It has been argued that collusion among the members of an organization or a vertical structure creates efficiency losses, and hence should be prevented. This paper shows that whenever collusion takes the form of co-insurance agreements, here called `friendships', among the members of a vertical...

We introduce ex-ante collusion whereby the supervisor stops monitoring for a transfer payment from the agent, in addition to ex-post collusion following the monitoring outcome. Extending a well-known model of hierarchy, we study the determinants of ex-ante collusion and show that, depending on...

Corruption is a widespread phenomenon around the world. Yet, models of hierarchical agency relationships tend not to predict collusion. The paper demonstrates that allowing collusion may be optimal if the principal cannot commit to an incentive scheme once and for all. The optimal extent of...