On the Notion of Responsibility in Organizations

Dirk Sliwka

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2006, vol. 22, issue 2, 523-547

Abstract: We derive a natural definition of responsibility in a formal model in which employees care for their career prospects: A superior holds a subordinate responsible for a task when she announces her belief that this subordinate contributes most to this task . We show that those announced beliefs lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the reputation of the responsible subordinate is then affected by the outcome of the task and he therefore has strong incentives to contribute to its success. There are equilibria in which either a single agent or no agent is responsible for a task but joint responsibility never arises. Several extensions are discussed. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jleo/ewj012 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: On the Notion of Responsibility in Organizations (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:22:y:2006:i:2:p:523-547

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization is currently edited by Andrea Prat

More articles in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().