Essays on information and career concerns in organizations

Contreary, Kara Alette (2012) Essays on information and career concerns in organizations. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the role of information and career concerns in organizations. To that end, I submit three papers, each of which addresses a unique aspect of a firm’s organizational problem. In the first chapter I investigate the incentives of a firm to reveal strategic information to the market in order to make its leader more conservative as regards early decisions. The firm may do so to achieve coordination between different levels of the firm’s hierarchy or to improve adaptation to the firm’s environment. I give conditions on employees’ career concerns that make the firm voluntarily disclose information concerning its strategic decisions. In chapter 2 I ask why rational voters would knowingly re-elect a politician who has expropriated public funds. In this model, the presence of non-strategic (‘impressionable’) voters means that even welfare-minded politicians occasionally raid the public purse in order to increase their chances of re-election. Being aware of this dynamic, rational voters opt to reward politicians whose misbehavior is solely due to career concerns. Chapter 3 changes tack somewhat to analyze the optimal decision-making protocol for a committee when one member of the committee is overconfident. I show that overconfidence leads an uninformed committee member to respond to his private information, which causes a better-informed member to stop using her private information. This leads to a loss of efficiency under majority rule, and changes the optimal voting rule for the committee to unanimity.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2012 Kara Alette Contreary
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
Sets:	Departments > Economics Collections > Economists Online
Supervisor:	Levy, Gilat
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/410

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