How should an organization’s center allocate resources units under its control which are better informed? Even with conscientious productivity reviews, important information will remain asymmetrically held. If units value their own expenditures more than those of their peers, they will seek excess budgets and expenditures. Fortunately, budget authorities can infer productivities from units’ exp...

If people are free to contract, will outcomes be efficient? We study the question through the lens of a non-cooperative model of contract negotiations, considering both compulsory and voluntary participation in negotiations. In either case, we find that all consistent equilibria of the contracting game are efficient in the case of two players. With mandatory participation, efficiency is attaina...

We examine the phenomenon of escalation from an economist's perspective, emphasizing explanations which do not rule out rational behavior on the part of rms or agents. We argue that escalation cannot be established as a separate phenomenon unless these possible alternative explanations are properly accounted for. We present Staw and Hoang's (1995) study of NBA data as an instance of where evide...

This paper studies the effect of litigation as a way to enforce patents when firms hold private information. Patent protection granted by courts affect the entry, settlement and litigation decisions of future innovations. The model is broadly consistent with recent empirical evidence. We show that higher protection might be detrimental to the patentholder since it reduces entry of infringers th...

Birey-Örgüt Uyumunun Örgütsel Vatandaşlık Davranışı Üzerindeki Etkisinde İşe Yabancılaşmanın Aracı Rolü
 
 Öz
 Bu araştırma gıda sektörü çalışanlarının, birey-örgüt uyumu, örgütsel vatandaşlık davranışı ve işe yabancılaşma algıları arasındaki ilişkileri incelemektedir. araştırmanın başlıca amacı, çalışanların uyumunun üzerindeki etkisini bu ilişkide yabancılaşmanın aracılık rolün...

Should the buyer of a customized good use competitive bidding or negotiation to select a contractor? To shed light on this question, we consider several possible determinants that may influence the choice of auctions versus negotiations. We then examine a comprehensive data set of private sector building contracts awarded in Northern California during the years 1995–2000. The analysis suggestsa...

In a public goods experiment with the opportunity to vote to expel members of a group, we found that contributions rose to nearly 100% of endowments with significantly higher efficiency compared with a noexpulsion baseline. Expulsions were strictly of the lowest contributors, and there was an exceptionally strong fall-off in contributions in the last period, when the expulsion threat was unavai...

We study a team whose members choose a joint project and exert individual efforts to implement it. Members have private information about the productivities of alternative projects. We find conditions under which information fails to be shared and the most productive project fails to be selected. While the concealment of information can be efficient, the team’s incentive to conceal is inefficie...

Many people contribute to public goods but stop doing so once they experience free riding. We test the hypothesis that groups whose members know that they are composed only of “likeminded” cooperators are able to maintain a higher cooperation level than the most cooperative, randomly composed groups. Our experiments confirm this hypothesis. We also predict that groups of “like-minded” free ride...

We take the hierarchical resource allocation model in Van Zandt (2003a) and derive a simpler, reduced-form model of balanced hierarchies. This model uses continuous approximations; we derive bounds on the errors due to these approximations. We then give results that indicate that optimal hierarchies in the general model of are approximately balanced. In particular, we show that aggregation shou...