Great Effort, Some Concern. How Making Effort to Acquire Information Influences Managerial Reporting

Risk, Managerial Effort, and Project Choice*

In our model risk-neutral shareholders need to motivate a manager to select among projects with different risks, and to work hard in implementing the chosen project. Curvature of the manager’s compensation contract as a function of profit affects his attitude toward project risk. The optimal curvature depends on the trade-off between controlling project risk and motivating effort. The analysis ...

On Making an Effort

This paper is in the main a critical study of Robert Kane’s account of the nature of Free Choice. I begin by briefly describing Kane’s theory. I then consider four questions about a concept that is central to his account—viz., the concept of an Effort of Will. I argue that Kane’s position affords satisfactory answers to three of these questions. Reflection on the fourth and final question, howe...

Effort reporting: government drops much-criticized paperwork.

Allocation of Search Effort to Optimize Information

Search theory is the discipline that studies the problem of how best to search for an object when the amount of searching efforts is limited and only probabilities of the object’s possible position are given. Then, the problem is to find the optimal distribution of this total effort that maximizes the probability of detection. Although the general formalism of search theory will be used subsequ...

Managerial Allocation of Time and Effort: The Effects of Interruptions1

Time is one of the more salient constraints on managerial behavior. This constraint may be very taxing in high velocity environments where managers have to attend to many tasks simultaneously. Earlier work by Radner [1976] proposed models based on notions of the thermostat or “putting out fires” to guide managerial time and effort allocation among tasks. We link these ideas to the issue of the ...