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I study the extent of secure property rights a planner can implement. Agents can produce output, appropriate others' output, or work in property rights enforcement. The planner pays enforcement personnel using taxes collected from producers who can hide income from taxation at a cost. The planner implements perfectly secure property rights by incentivizing production through redistributive taxation and absorbing potential appropriators as enforcement personnel. Both taxation and employment in enforcement institutionalize redistribution that would otherwise take place through appropriation. Higher costs of hiding income permit more redistributive taxation and less enforcement, leading to more production and higher welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assignment of authority entitles the decision maker to undertake decisions that impose externalities on the payoffs of other members of the organization. This paper studies how the optimal allocation of decision rights depends on the preferences of the organization’s members. It adopts a mechanism-design approach to show how the communication of private information affects the efficient allocation of authority. An extension to multiple decision areas shows that decentralized control rights may enhance organizational efficiency unless there exist strong complementarities between different decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]