A main prediction of agency theory is the well known risk-incentive trade-off. Incentive contracts should be found in environments with little uncertainty and for agents with low degrees of risk aversion. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the first trade-off. Due to lack of...

In economic approaches it is often argued that reputation considerations influence the behavior of individuals or firms and that reputation influences the outcome of markets. Empirical evidence is rare though. In this contribution we argue that a positive reputation of sellers should have an...

Many firms use subjective performance appraisal systems due to lack of objectiveperformance measures. In these cases, supervisors usually have to rate the performance oftheir subordinates. Using such systems, it is a well established fact that many supervisorstend to assess the employees too...