The marginal cost of effort often increases as effort is exerted. In a dynamic moral hazard setting, dynamically increasing costs create information asymmetry. This paper characterizes the optimal contract and helps explain the popular yet thus far puzzling use of non-linear incentives, for...

We study what kind of equilibria of which mechanisms are ex post renegotiation-proof (EPRP), i.e., robust against the possibility of ex post renegotiation under a variety of renegotiation procedures, and which social choice functions are EPRP implementable. In complete information environments...

The paper compares conventional and final-offer arbitration. One party is supposed to make a payment to another party, whose amount depends on a state. Under one scenario, parties obtain signals about the state, which cannot be recognized by the opponents. If the arbitrator's ability of...

We compare the ability of two common compensation structures, efficiency wages (EW) and deferred compensation (DC), at inducing effort from workers. We test predictions on effort provision and elicit preferences between the two wage structures. The theoretical predictions on effort are generally...

This paper shows that the informativeness principle, as originally formulated by Holmstrom (1979), does not hold if the first-order approach is invalid. We introduce a "generalized informativeness principle" that takes into account non-local incentive constraints and holds generically, even...

This paper shows that the informativeness principle does not automatically extend to settings with limited liability. Even if a signal is informative about effort, it may have no value for contracting. An agent with limited liability is paid zero for certain output realizations. Thus, even if...

The informativeness principle demonstrates qualitative benefits to increasing signal precision. However, it is difficult to quantify these benefits -- and compare them against the costs of precision -- since we typically cannot solve for the optimal contract and analyze how it changes with...

This paper investigates the matching between banks and firms in the loan market. We estimate a many-to-one two-sided matching model using the Fox (2010) matching maximum score estimator. Using data on the U.S. loan market from 2000 to 2003, we find evidence of positive assortative matching of...