Fairness, envy, guilt and greed: building equity considerations into agency theory

In this article we examine the extent to which fairness considerations are salient to senior executives, and consider the implications for agency theory, tournament theory and the design of top-management incentives. We look for patterns in a unique data set of senior executive preferences and seek explanations for these patterns using a model of fairness first advanced by Fehr and Schmidt in 1999. We propose a number of amendments to Fehr and Schmidt’s model. We challenge some of the standard tenets of agency theory and tournament theory, demonstrating why equity considerations should be taken into account. We add to the growing literature on behavioural agency theory

Reformulating classical and quantum mechanics in terms of a unified set of consistency conditions

This paper imposes consistency conditions on the path of a particle and shows that they imply Hamilton's principle in classical contexts and Schrödinger's equation in quantum mechanical contexts. Thus this paper provides a common, intuitive foundation for classical and quantum mechanics. It also provides a very new perspective on quantum mechanics.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44577/1/10773_2005_Article_BF02114663.pd

Relational Contracts and Organizational Capabilities

A large literature identifies unique organizational capabilities as a potent source of competitive advantage, yet our knowledge of why capabilities fail to diffuse more rapidly—particularly in situations in which competitors apparently have strong incentives to adopt them and a well-developed understanding of how they work—remains incomplete. In this paper we suggest that competitively significant capabilities often rest on managerial practices that in turn rely on relational contracts (i.e., informal agreements sustained by the shadow of the future). We argue that one of the reasons these practices may be difficult to copy is that effective relational contracts must solve the twin problems of credibility and clarity and that although credibility might, in principle, be instantly acquired, clarity may take time to develop and may interact with credibility in complex ways so that relational contracts may often be difficult to build

Measurement scheduling for recursive team estimation

We consider a decentralized LQG measurement scheduling problem in which every measurement is costly, no communication between observers is permitted, and the observers' estimation errors are coupled quadratically. This setup, motivated by considerations from organization theory, models measurement scheduling problems in which cost, bandwidth, or security constraints necessitate that estimates be decentralized, although their errors are coupled. We show that, unlike the centralized case, in the decentralized case the problem of optimizing the time integral of the measurement cost and the quadratic estimation error is fundamentally stochastic, and we characterize the ε-optimal open-loop schedules as chattering solutions of a deterministic Lagrange optimal control problem. Using a numerical example, we describe also how this deterministic optimal control problem can be solved by nonlinear programming.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45246/1/10957_2005_Article_BF02275352.pd

Inside Organizations: Pricing, Politics, and Path Dependence

When economists have considered organizations, much attention has focused on the boundary of the firm, rather than its internal structures and processes. In contrast, this review sketches three approaches to the economic theory of internal organization—one substantially developed, another rapidly emerging, and a third on the horizon. The first approach (pricing) applies Pigou's prescription: If markets get prices wrong, then the economist's job is to fix the prices. The second approach (politics) considers environments where important actions inside organizations simply cannot be priced, so power and control become central. Finally, the third approach (path dependence) complements the first two by shifting attention from the between variance to the within. That is, rather than asking how organizations confronting different circumstances should choose different structures and processes, the focus here is on how path dependence can cause persistent performance differences among seemingly similar enterprises

Revisiting consistency with random utility maximisation: theory and implications for practical work

While the paradigm of utility maximisation has formed the basis of the majority of applications in discrete choice modelling for over 40 years, its core assumptions have been questioned by work in both behavioural economics and mathematical psychology as well as more recently by developments in the RUM-oriented choice modelling community. This paper reviews the basic properties with a view to explaining the historical pre-eminence of utility maximisation and addresses the question of what departures from the paradigm may be necessary or wise in order to accommodate richer behavioural patterns. We find that many, though not all, of the behavioural traits discussed in the literature can be approximated sufficiently closely by a random utility framework, allowing analysts to retain the many advantages that such an approach possesses