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The Effects of Performance on Decision Making Authority

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The effects of performance on decision making authority

Christian Schumacher

I. Introduction
Authority-- a superior’s legitimate ability to demand obedient behavior from one or more subordinates within a specified realm of actions—is a central feature in human organizations and established as solution to fundamental organizational design challenges within a decision-making framework (e.g. Simon, 1947; Weber, 1922). The problem of the centralization or decentralization of decision rights concerns the locus of the authority to make decisions affecting the organization. (Colombo & Delmastro, 2008)

The question of the determinants of the allocation of decision rights in firms has received considerable attention from different streams of economists and strategy scholars over the last couple of decades. The information processing stream ( see Radner & Marschak, 1972; Harris & Raviv, 2002; Sah & Stiglitz, 1986) contends that hierarchical organizations that centralize the decision-making function can suffer from organizational failures, consisting in leaks that arise in transmitting information from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy and vice versa. Benefits of delegation than arise because of inefficiencies in intra-firm communication (Keren, Levhari, & Kerent, 1979) implementation delays (Radner, 1993), fully exploitation of economies arising from local capabilities and specialization tasks (Bolton & Dewatripont, 1994) and high opportunity costs of highrank managers (Harris & Raviv, 2002).

Conversely to the information processing stream, which emphasizes the costs of information processing and transmission, the decentralization of incentives stream (Aghion & Tirole, 1997; Dessein, 2002; Rajan &

Zingales, 1998) focuses attention on the incentive costs that arise with decentralized decision-making (Colombo & Delmastro, 2008). Aghion and Tirole (1997)

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