Contract Renegotiation and Organizational Design

This paper studies the implications of non-commitment for organizational design. An organizational form must trade-off between the coordination benefits associated with the centralization of information and its associated costs in terms of renegotiation. The analysis makes precise what these benefits and costs are. First, I characterize renegotiation-proof allocations for organizational forms that differ in the amount of decentralization that they support. Second, I compare these different organizational forms. The analysis shown that (1) complete decentralization of decision-making is always weakly dominated by a more centralized structures when information is dispersed in the organization; (2) the player with the most important or relevant information should be the decision-maker.