Sequential Investments, Know-How Transmission, and Optimal Organization
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Tsung-Sheng Tsai
In a two-stage sequential investment problem, a principal can use either a single agent or two separate agents to execute the project. The final outcome of the project depends upon both the agent's investments and the first-stage outcome. The principal wishes to stop the project when the first stage is a failure; however, she may not know the first-stage outcome, so that she has to pay the agent a rent to extract that information. Furthermore, the first-stage agent can transmit his know-how to the second-stage agent. Although there is a transmission cost under separate agency while there is no cost under single agency, single agency is not always optimal. This is because the transmission cost can reduce the agent's incentive to continue the project so that the information rent can be lower under separate agency. Hence, the principal may prefer separate agency more even when the transmission cost becomes larger.
©2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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- Input Production Joint Venture
- On the Existence and Social Optimality of Equilibria in a Hotelling Game with Uncertain Demand and Linear-Quadratic Costs
- Stochastic Stability in Finitely Repeated Two Player Games
- Alliance Partner Choice in Markets with Vertical and Horizontal Externalities
- Transitional Dynamics in a Tullock Contest with a General Cost Function
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Articles in the same Issue
- Advances Article
- Strategy-Proof Compromises
- Make-or-Buy Decisions and the Manipulability of Performance Measures
- Optimal Mechanism for Selling Two Goods
- A Property of Solutions to Linear Monopoly Problems
- Interactive Epistemology and Solution Concepts for Games with Asymmetric Information
- No-Trade in the Laboratory
- Symmetry or Dynamic Consistency?
- Contributions Article
- When Two-Part Tariffs are Not Enough: Mixing with Nonlinear Pricing
- Sellers Like Clusters
- Network Architecture and the Left-Right Spectrum
- Information, Authority, and Corporate Hierarchies
- The Benefit of Mixing Private Noise into Public Information in Beauty Contest Games
- Intertemporal Bounded Rationality as Consideration Sets with Contraction Consistency
- The Survival Assumption in Intertemporal Economies
- A New Existence and Uniqueness Theorem for Continuous Games
- Multiproduct Duopoly with Vertical Differentiation
- Topics Article
- Sequential Investments, Know-How Transmission, and Optimal Organization
- Input Production Joint Venture
- On the Existence and Social Optimality of Equilibria in a Hotelling Game with Uncertain Demand and Linear-Quadratic Costs
- Stochastic Stability in Finitely Repeated Two Player Games
- Alliance Partner Choice in Markets with Vertical and Horizontal Externalities
- Transitional Dynamics in a Tullock Contest with a General Cost Function
- Strategic Choice of Preferences: the Persona Model
- Implementation of the Core in College Admissions Problems When Colleagues Matter
