We consider an economy that has to decide how assets are to be used. Agents have ideas, but these ideas conflict. We suppose that decision-making authority is determined by hierarchy: each asset has a chain of command, and the most senior person with an idea exercises authority. We analyze the optimal hierarchical structure given that some agents…

An obvious and natural approach to organizing a large corpus of data is a hierarchical index--akin to a book's table of contents. The type of corpus dealt with here is a bibliographical repository, with entries form a limited domain. Given such an index, it is desirable that search results point to relevant locations in the hierarchy, rather than…