We study decentralized learning in organizations. Decentralization is captured through Crawford and Haller’s [Learning how to cooperate: optimal play in repeated coordination games, Econometrica 58 (1990) 571–595] attainability constraints on strategies. We analyze a repeated game with imperfectly observable actions. A fixed subset of action profiles are successes and all others are failures. T...

The NHS Plan welcomes the use of team rewards but does not specify how team based incentives are to be implemented or make clear what types of teams such incentives are to be given to. This paper looks for insights from economic theory on how to define teams and optimal incentive schemes within them. We give a brief description of the incentive mechanisms suggested in the NHS Plan and discuss t...

The Limits of Self-Governance in the Presence of Spite: Experimental Evidence from Urban and Rural Russia We report evidence from public goods experiments with and without punishment which we conducted in Russia with 566 urban and rural participants of young and mature age cohorts. Russia is interesting for studying voluntary cooperation because of its long history of collectivism, and a huge u...

I study repeated games with mediated communication and frequent actions. I derive a Folk Theorem with imperfect monitoring assuming a conditional form of individual identifiability. Even in the limit, when noise is driven by Brownian motion and actions are arbitrarily frequent, as long as players are sufficiently patient they can attain virtually efficient equilibrium outcomes, in two ways: sec...

This paper studies the impact of innovation on the organizational structure. The theoretical framework predicts that a larger parental pool of knowledge raises the probability of offshoring. This holds in a national as well as an international context. However, when the producer loses territorial protection, the changeover from non-integration to integration is delayed. Employing data on German...

On the Hidden Costs of Incentive Schemes By enriching a principal-agent model it is shown that the introduction of monetary incentives may reduce an agent’s motivation. In a first step, we allow for the possibility that some agents stick to unverifiable agreements. The larger the fraction of reliable agents, the lower powered will then be the optimal incentive scheme and fixed wages become opti...

Because of its inappropriability, protection of property rights is widely recognized as being the state’s responsibility. Moreover, recent empirical evidence suggests that it leads to higher investment levels and faster growth. Nevertheless, the extent of property rights protection differs significantly across countries. This paper endogenizes the emergence of property rights within a simple gr...

This paper investigates the consequences of imperfect and uneven factor market development for farm efficiency in rural China during transition. In particular, we estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative (instead of market) allocation of land, and the extent of unevenly developed non-agricultural opportunities. Using a rec...

The commercialization of university research has become an increasingly important issue, given concerns regarding licensing and the university’s desire to maximize the returns to intellectual property (IP). In this paper, we assess the impact of university resources and routines/capabilities on the creation of spin-out companies. We find that both the number of spin-out companies created and th...

In this paper we consider the problem of the control of access to a firm’s productive asset, embedding the relevant decision makers into a general structure of formal authority relations. Within such an authority structure, each decision maker acts as a principal to some decision makers, while she acts as an agent in relation to certain other decision makers. We study under which conditions dec...