Michael Powell

Associate Professor (with tenure) of Strategy, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Email: mike-powell@kellogg.northwestern.edu
Address: 2211 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: (847) 491-8676

Research Interests: Organizational Economics, Personnel Economics, Relational Contracts, Theory of the Firm

Working Papers

Common Agent or Double Agent? Pharmacy Benefit Managers in the Prescription Drug Market, with Rena Conti, Brigham Frandsen, and Jim Rebitzer, revise and resubmit, RESTAT. Draft: May 2024.

PUBLIshed Papers

Organizing Modular Production, with Niko Matouschek and Bryony Reich. JPE, forthcoming.

Career Spillovers in Internal Labour Markets, with Nicola Bianchi, Giulia Bovini, Jin Li, and Matteo Paradisi. Kellogg Insight. NBER Digest. RESTUD, July 2023.

A/B Contracts, with George Georgiadis. Kellogg Insight. AER, January 2022.

Behavioral Constraints on the Design of Subgame-Perfect Implementation Mechanisms, with Ernst Fehr and Tom Wilkening. AER, April 2021 [lead article].

Multilateral Interactions Improve Cooperation Under Random Fluctuations, with Jin Li. GEB, January 2020.

Sticking Points: Common-Agency Problems and Contracting in the U.S. Healthcare System, with Brigham Frandsen and Jim Rebitzer. RAND, Summer 2019 [lead article]. Slides.

Policies in Relational Contracts, with Dan Barron. AEJ: Micro, May 2019. Slides. Kellogg Insight.

Productivity and Credibility in Industry Equilibrium. RAND, Spring 2019. Slides.

Managing Careers in Organizations, with Rongzhu Ke and Jin Li, JOLE, January 2018. Slides. Kellogg Insight.

Power Dynamics in Organizations, with Jin Li and Niko Matouschek, AEJ: Micro, February 2017. Slides. Kellogg Insight.

An Influence-Cost Model of Organizational Practices and Firm Boundaries, JLEO, August 2015. Slides.

Organization and Information: Firms' Governance Choices in Rational-Expectations Equilibrium, with Robert Gibbons and Richard Holden, QJE, November 2012.

Work in Progress

Firm Boundaries and Knowledge Sharing, with Evgenii Fadeev.

Acquisitions and Relational Management Practices, with Rocco Macchiavello and Ameet Morjaria.

Markets for Rhetorical Services, with Dan Barron.

Promotion Opportunities and Production Dynamics, with Jin Li, Ye Luo, and Rongzhu Ke.

Organizational Economics: Foundations and Applications, with Dan Barron and Robert Gibbons, under contract, Princeton University Press

Economics of Strategy, 8th edition, with David Besanko, David Dranove, Craig Garthwaite, Scott Schaefer, and Mark Shanley, under contract, Wiley.

Other Publications

Organizational Economics and the US Healthcare System, with David Chan, Brigham Frandsen, and Jim Rebitzer. In The Economics of US Healthcare: Competition, Innovation, Regulation, and Organizations, May 2023.

What Happens to Younger Workers When Older Workers Don’t Retire? with Nicola Bianchi and Jin Li, HBR, November 2018.

Teaching

Lecture notes for Organizational Economics PhD sequence, with Dan Barron, Spring 2018.

Lecture notes for General Equilibrium and Contracts, Spring 2018