Volume 35, Number 1, 73-97, DOI: 10.1007/s00199-007-0216-9

The good, the bad and the ugly: agent behavior and efficiency in open and closed organizations

Duncan M. Holthausen and Theofanis Tsoulouhas

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Abstract

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.

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