Current literature has largely ignored the fact that some organizations are highly selective when admitting new agents while
others are more open. In addition, some organizations audit or sort agent behavior within the organization more aggressively
than others. One might expect a priori that closed, highly selective, organizations would always be more efficient because
they screen out the worst types, which could lead to better agent behavior. We show that this is not the case. Specifically,
when agent behavior in equilibrium is uniform across organizations (i.e., when the number of agents behaving the same way
is identical), closed organizations are inefficient. However, when agent behavior varies across organizations, closed organizations
may or may not be inefficient, depending on net payoffs to the organization and the agents. Our analysis implies that organizations
should choose the open type when screening or sorting costs are high, when there is a high frequency of good agent types in
the population, when agent misbehavior does not reduce output significantly, and when penalties for misbehavior are large.
Keywords Asymmetric information - Organization theory - Efficiency - Sorting - Screening
JEL Classification Numbers D82 - L22
The paper has benefitted from useful comments by David Flath, Charles Knoeber, Claudio Mezzetti, two anonymous referees and
participants of the Spring 2005 Midwest Economic Theory meetings at Vanderbilt University, the 2005 meetings of the Society
for the Advancement of Economic Theory in Vigo, Spain, the 2005 conference on Research in Economic Theory and Econometrics
in Syros, Greece, and workshops at North Carolina State University, Texas A&M University and McGill University.