Sharing Information through Delegation and Collaboration

Otto Swank () and Bauke Visser

No 04-042/1, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: This article analyzes under which conditions a manager can motivate a junior worker by verbal communication, and explains why communication is often tied up with organizational choices as job enlargement and collaboration. Our model has two important features. First, the manager has more information about a junior's ability than the junior himself. Second, the junior's effort and ability are complements. We show that the manager has an incentive to exaggerate the junior's ability. We discuss two ways in which the manager can make credible statements about the junior's ability. First, the senior can delegate a task to the junior for which it is important that the junior has a correct perception of his ability. Information is shared through a costless signal. Second, the senior can spend more time on a junior she perceives as able than on a junior she perceives as less able. Information is then shared through a costly signal.

Keywords: Communication; incentives; signalling; overconfidence; delegation; collaboration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 D23 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/04042.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:tin:wpaper:20040042

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().