Organizational Structure as the Channeling of Boundedly Rational Pre-play Communication

Tore Ellingsen and Robert Östling

No 634, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: We model organizational decision making as costless pre-play communication. Decision making is called authoritarian if only one player is allowed to speak and consensual if all players are allowed to speak. Players are assumed to have limited cognitive capacity and we characterize their behavior under each decision making regime for two different cognitive hierarchy models. Our results suggest that authoritarian decision making is optimal when players have conflicting preferences over the set of Nash equilibrium outcomes, whereas consensual decision making is optimal when players have congruent preferences over this set. The intuition is that authoritarian decision making avoids conflict, but sometimes creates insufficient mutual trust to implement socially optimal outcomes.

Keywords: Organizational decision making; coordination games; communication; cognitive hierarchy models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 L20 M21 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2006-09-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-gth and nep-knm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:hastef:0634

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