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Referrals

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Author Info
Luis Garicano
Tano Santos

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Abstract

Specialization requires that workers deal with some valuable opportunities themselves and refer other, possibly unverifiable, opportunities to other workers. How do markets and organizations ensure the matching of opportunities with talent in the presence of informational asymmetries about their value? The cost of providing incentives for effort in this context is that they increase the risk of the agent appropriating an opportunity she should refer upstream. Thus spot markets are severely limited in their ability to support referrals, as they involve very powerful effort incentives on those opportunities kept by the referring agents. We show that partnerships, in which agents agree to share opportunities and the income from the opportunities, appear endogenously as a solution to this problem. Partnership contracts support better communication rules at the expense of biasing effort provision away from first best for all activities. The structure of the contract depends both on the frequency of communications and on the interaction between the relative skill of the agents and the direction of the referral flow.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 8367.

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Date of creation: Jul 2001
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8367

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D2 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations
G3 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance

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  2. Schultz, Christian, 1996. "Polarization and Inefficient Policies," Review of Economic Studies, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 63(2), pages 331-44, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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    Other versions:
  4. Taylor, Curtis R, 1995. "The Economics of Breakdowns, Checkups, and Cures," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(1), pages 53-74, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  6. Maggi G. & Rodriguez-Clare A., 1995. "On Countervailing Incentives," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 66(1), pages 238-263, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  7. Kandel, Eugene & Lazear, Edward P, 1992. "Peer Pressure and Partnerships," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 100(4), pages 801-17, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  8. Canice Prendergast, 1999. "The Provision of Incentives in Firms," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 37(1), pages 7-63, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  9. Jullien, Bruno, 2000. "Participation Constraints in Adverse Selection Models," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 93(1), pages 1-47, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  11. Raghuram G. Rajan & Luigi Zingales, 1998. "Power In A Theory Of The Firm," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 113(2), pages 387-432, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  12. Teece, David J., 1996. "Firm organization, industrial structure, and technological innovation," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 193-224, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  14. Asher Wolinsky, 1993. "Competition in a Market for Informed Experts' Services," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 24(3), pages 380-398, Autumn. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  15. Bagwell, Kyle & Riordan, Michael H, 1991. "High and Declining Prices Signal Product Quality," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(1), pages 224-39, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  16. Akerlof, George A, 1970. "The Market for 'Lemons': Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 84(3), pages 488-500, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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