This award funds research using tools from economic theory to analyze how incentives work in organizations. The toal is to understand what outcomes a specific organization can achieve, and how internal communication facilitates the incentives that are necessary to keep each individual organization member working towards the common goal. The PI focuses specifically on situations where the organizations use rich communication protocols, and will incorporate insights from exisiting work in contract theory and mechanism design while expanded our knowledge in both areas.
The research is made up of two main projects. The first focuses on how monitors are themselves monitored and evaluated. Starting from a novel answer this question, the PI then builds and analyzes a new model that predicts the range of outcomes that a partnership organization can achieve.
The second project looks at dynamic mechanism design and is focused on understanding the dynamic incentives created by the kinds of contracts proposed and analyzed in the first project. The research characterizes dynamic implementation and optimal dynamic mechanisms and then goes on to fully describe the equilibrium payoff set of a class of multi-stage not-necessarily-repeated games with communication.
This research may provide a tractable analytic framework for a broad variety of interdisciplinary research about organizations with rich communication protocols. This framework may be useful in political science, management science, and organizational behavior.
