Sharing of assets such as sensors and services is essential for effective coalition operations where two or more partners work in cooperation. Typically, user-created tasks compete for the use of relatively scarce assets in a highly dynamic operational environment. Efficient use of resources requires automated support for assigning assets to tasks, that takes into account policies on the sharin...

This paper develops a theory of the firm in which a firm’s centralized asset ownership and low-powered incentives give a manager ‘interpersonal authority’ over employees (in a world with differing priors). The paper derives such interpersonal authority as an equilibrium phenomenon. One key result is that a manager’s control over critical assets – through its effect on the level of outside optio...

This paper develops a theory of the firm in which a firm’s centralized asset ownership and low-powered incentives give a manager, as an equilibrium outcome, “interpersonal authority” over employees (in a setting with differing priors). The role of low-powered incentives is both to minimize the employees’ temptation to disobey and to co-locate income and control. The role of the manager controll...

This paper explains frequently observed coexistence of deficient property rights and heavy bureaucracies. We suggest that there is a specific role for bureaucracies in environments with insure property rights. In such situations, bureaucracies substitute for enforceable contracts. We study irreversible investment in an asset over which property rights are unclear, and model the property rights ...

Chinese immigrants are a diverse and growing group whose members provide a unique opportunity to examine within-immigrant group differences in adaptation. In this paper, we move beyond thinking of national-origin groups as homogenous and study variation among Chinese immigrants in wealth ownership, a critical indicator of adaptation that attracts relatively little attention in the immigration l...

The decision of whether to manufacture products within the US, manufacture internationally or to outsource production depends critically upon a thorough understanding of the costs and benefits of each option. In this paper, we contribute to such an understanding by considering the impact of US tax depreciation rules, which differ depending upon whether a US corporation locates its assets at dom...

BACKGROUND In this paper we seek to tease out differences in socioeconomic position between ethnic groups. There are 3 main reasons why conventional socioeconomic indicators and asset based measures may not be equally applicable to all ethnic groups:1) Differences in response rate to conventional socioeconomic indicators2) Cultural and social differences in economic priorities/opportunities3) D...

Using data from India, we estimate the relationship between household wealth and children's school enrollment. We proxy wealth by constructing a linear index from asset ownership indicators, using principal-components analysis to derive weights. In Indian data this index is robust to the assets included, and produces internally coherent results. State-level results correspond well to independen...