Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive o...

Principal Agent Theory (PAT) seeks to identify incentives and sanctions that a consumer should offer a producer as part of a contract in order to maximise the former’s utility. However, identifying optimal contracts in large systems is difficult, particularly when little information is available about producer competencies. In this work we propose that a global contract be used to govern such i...

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your perso...

We use a principal-agent framework to compare two types of organisational structures, centralisation and delegation. Moreover, we do so in a framework that allows for collusive possibilities among the agents. Under a centralised structure the principal directly contracts with all agents, whereas under delegation the principal contracts with only a few of the agents, giving them the right to ent...

Despite a decade since the inception of B2C e-commerce, the uncertainty of the online environment still makes many consumers reluctant to engage in online exchange relationships. Elena Karahanna was the accepting senior editor for this paper. D. Harrison McKnight and Jonathan D. Wareham served as reviewers. The associate editor and the third reviewer chose to remain anonymous. Even if uncertain...

Judge Posner (2010) identifies organizational economics with the principal-agent problem and offers no definition of the crucial term organization, which leads him to force the principal-agent template on social formations that are not organizations and to neglect aspects of their operation that might be illuminated by alternative conceptions of organizational economics. This response offers an...