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"This paper reconsiders the comparison between hierarchical contests and single-stage contests. A condition is given that characterizes whether and when the aggregate equilibrium payoff of contestants is higher in the single-stage contest, and when the single-stage contest is more likely to award the prize to the contestant who values it most highly. The outcome depends on inter- and intra-group heterogeneity, and is not driven by free-rider incentives." (author's abstract)

Power is a core concept in the analysis and design of organisations. In this paper we consider positional power in hierarchies. One of the problems with the extant literature on positional power in hierarchies is that it is mainly restricted to the analysis of power in terms of the bare positions of the actors. While such an analysis informs us about the authority structure within an organisation, it ignores the decision-making mechanisms completely. The few studies which take into account the decision-making mechanisms make all use of adaptations of well-established approaches for the analysis of power in non-hierarchical organisations such as the Banzhaf measure; and thus they are all based on the structure of a simple game, i.e. they are 'membershipbased'. We demonstrate that such an approach is in general inappropriate for characterizing power in hierarchies as it cannot be extended to a class of decision-making mechanisms which allow certain actors to terminate a decision before all other members have been involved. As this kind of sequential decision-making mechanism turns out to be particularly relevant for hierarchies, we suggest an action-b! ased approach - represented by an extensive game form - which can take the features of such mechanisms into account. Based on this approach we introduce a power score and measure that can be applied to ascribe positional power to actors in sequential decision making mechanisms.

The formal hierarchical structures of organizations can be expected to affect the organizations' behavior in many different ways. One kind of impact is that their structures may affect how their knowledge is organized. This is important because the different ways in which knowledge can be organized may affect what the organizations' decision makers learn from the information that their organizations have gathered, stored, and processed. However, rigorous testing of this general argument would not be easy, and so it would be useful if a preliminary means of assessment could be found so that we can better judge whether a full-scale test is warranted. Hammond (1993) noted that a library catalogue is also a formal structure for hierarchically organizing knowledge, which means that different kinds of cataloguing systems represent different ways of organizing knowledge. Two different kinds of cataloguing systems - the Library of Congress classification and the Dewey Decimal classification - are widely used in US libraries, and Hammond conjectured that these two different cataloguing systems will tend to bring different sets of books to the attention of library users; this in turn should be expected to have consequences for what the library users can most easily learn from the library. This article tests Hammond's conjecture in two university libraries, focusing on 40 classic books in political science. The results provide strong empirical support for the conjecture: although the two cataloguing systems do not appear to organize knowledge in completely different ways, what differences they do have nonetheless appear to have a striking impact on what users can most easily learn. Support is thus provided, albeit indirectly, for the general argument that how organizations are structured hierarchically should be expected to affect what organizational decision makers are able to learn. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2007.]

Introduction : theorising hierarchies / Ayse Zarakol -- Laws and norms in the making of international hierarchies / David Lake - Making empires : hierarchy, conquest and customization / Andrew Phillips -- Hierarchy and paternalism / Michael Barnett -- Revealing international hierarchy through gender lenses / Laura Sjoberg -- Against authority : the heavy weight of international hierarchy / Vincent Pouliot -- Hierarchy in an age of equality : micro-states and dependencies / J.C. Sharman -- 'Command and control?' : hierarchy in the politics of foreign military bases / Alex Cooley -- Leading authority as hierarchy among INGOs / Sarah Stroup and Wendy Wong -- 'Lazy Greeks' and 'Nazi Germans' : negotiating international hierarchies in the Euro crisis / Rebecca Adler-Nissen -- 'Subcultural groupings' in international system hierarchy : China in Africa / Shogo Suzuki -- Beyond hierarchy / Jack Donnelly -- Why hierarchy? / Ayse Zarakol

Many economic and political organizations have some relational structure, meaning that participating agents do not only differ with respect to certain individual characteristics such as wealth and preferences, but also belong to some relational structure in which they usually take different positions. Two examples of such structures are communication networks and hierarchies. In the literature, the distinction between these two types of relational structures is not always clear. In models of restricted cooperation, this distinction should be defined by properties of the set of feasible coalitions. We characterize the sets of feasible coalitions in communication networks and compare them with sets of feasible coalitions arising from hierarchies. © 2011 The Author(s).