IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/ecogov/v6y2005i2p177-197.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Influence costs and hierarchy

Author

Listed:
  • Roman Inderst
  • Holger Müller
  • Karl Wärneryd

Abstract

In an internal capital market, individual departments may compete for a share of the firm’s budget by engaging in wasteful influence activities. We show that firms with more levels of hierarchy may experience lower influence costs than less hierarchical firms, even though the former provide more opportunities for exerting influence. The unique influence-cost minimizing hierarchy is strongly asymmetric. With a linear production technology this is also the optimal hierarchy. If individual departments have different productivities, however, and the production technology exhibits decreasing returns to scale, a symmetric hierarchy that does not minimize influence costs may be optimal. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2005

Suggested Citation

  • Roman Inderst & Holger Müller & Karl Wärneryd, 2005. "Influence costs and hierarchy," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 6(2), pages 177-197, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:ecogov:v:6:y:2005:i:2:p:177-197
    DOI: 10.1007/s10101-004-0084-8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10101-004-0084-8
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10101-004-0084-8?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wärneryd, Karl, 2014. "Rent Seeking and Organizational Structure," SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 749, Stockholm School of Economics.
    2. Kräkel, Matthias, 2006. "On the "Adverse Selection" of Organizations," Discussion Paper Series of SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems 168, Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich.
    3. Kräkel, Matthias, 2006. "Firm Size, Economic Situation and Influence Activities," Bonn Econ Discussion Papers 16/2006, University of Bonn, Bonn Graduate School of Economics (BGSE).
    4. Fu, Qiang & Lu, Jingfeng, 2006. "The beauty of "bigness" in contest design: merging or splitting?," MPRA Paper 947, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Oliver Gürtler, 2010. "Haggling for Rents, Relational Contracts, and the Theory of the Firm," Schmalenbach Business Review (sbr), LMU Munich School of Management, vol. 62(4), pages 359-377, October.
    6. Cordella, Antonio & Cordella, Tito, 2017. "Motivations, monitoring technologies, and pay for performance," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 236-255.
    7. Ivo Bischoff & Frédéric Blaeschke, 2013. "Incentives and Influence Activities in the Public Sector: the Trade-off in Performance Budgeting and Conditional Grants," MAGKS Papers on Economics 201320, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung).
    8. Wulf, Julie, 2009. "Influence and inefficiency in the internal capital market," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 72(1), pages 305-321, October.
    9. repec:elg:eechap:15325_6 is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Brice Corgnet & Ludivine Martin & Peguy Ndodjang & Angela Sutan, 2015. "On the Merit of Equal Pay: When Influence Activities Interact with Incentive Setting," Working Papers 15-09, Chapman University, Economic Science Institute.
    11. repec:ebl:ecbull:v:12:y:2002:i:2:p:1-13 is not listed on IDEAS
    12. Szu-Wen Chou, 2002. "Flattened Resource Allocation, Hierarch Design and the Boundaries of the Firm," Levine's Working Paper Archive 618897000000000056, David K. Levine.
    13. Johannes Münster, 2009. "Group contest success functions," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 41(2), pages 345-357, November.
    14. Dur, Robert & Roelfsema, Hein, 2010. "Social exchange and common agency in organizations," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 55-63, January.
    15. Yildirim, Mustafa, 2019. "Optimal team size under legislative bargaining with costly recognition," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 177(C), pages 81-84.
    16. Fu, Qiang & Lu, Jingfeng, 2009. "The beauty of "bigness": On optimal design of multi-winner contests," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 66(1), pages 146-161, May.
    17. Inderst, Roman & Muller, Holger M. & Warneryd, Karl, 2007. "Distributional conflict in organizations," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 51(2), pages 385-402, February.
    18. repec:elg:eechap:15325_7 is not listed on IDEAS
    19. Cedomir Ljubojevic & Gordana Ljubojevic & Nina Maksimovic, 2013. "Corporate Governance and Competitive Capability in Serbian Companies," MIC 2013: Industry, Science and Policy Makers for Sustainable Future; Proceedings of the 14th International Conference, Koper, 21–23 November 2013 [Selected Papers],, University of Primorska, Faculty of Management Koper.
    20. Warneryd, Karl, 2001. "Replicating contests," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 71(3), pages 323-327, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Hierarchies; influence activities; internal capital markets;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D74 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Conflict; Conflict Resolution; Alliances; Revolutions
    • G31 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Capital Budgeting; Fixed Investment and Inventory Studies
    • G34 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:ecogov:v:6:y:2005:i:2:p:177-197. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.