Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer --- the seller --- follows from a non--trivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer--induced certification acts as an inspection device, whence...

Temporary contracts provide employers with a tool to screen potential new employees and have been shown to provide ‘stepping stones’ into permanent employment for workers. For both reasons, workers on temporary contracts have an incentive to provide more effort than permanent employees....

We study a sequential two-stage all-pay auction with two identical prizes. In each stage, the players compete for one prize and each player may win either one or two prizes. The designer may impose a cap on the players' bids in each of the stages. We analyze the equilibrium in this sequential...

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...

We analyze a long-term contracting problem involving common uncertainty about a parameter capturing the productivity of the relationship, and featuring a hidden action for the agent. We develop an approach that works for any utility function when the parameter and noise are normally distributed...

We exploit an incentive change in professional soccer leagues aimed at encouraging more attacking and goal scoring to obtain evidence on the effect of stronger incentives on productive and destructive effort. Using as control the behavior of the same teams in a competition that experienced no...

We study all-pay auctions with multiple prizes. The players have the same value for all the certain prizes except for one uncertain prize for which each player has a private value. We characterize the equilibrium strategy and show that if the number of prizes is smaller than the number of...

This Paper analyses the welfare effects of price restrictions on private contracting in a world where agents have a limited cognitive ability. People compute the costs and benefits of entering a transaction with an error. The government knows the distribution of true costs and benefits as well...

We study the design of a sequence of two contests between a pair of identical risk averse employees whose effort choices are private information. It is optimal for the organization to `bias' the second contest in favor of the early winner - the reduction in second-period incentives is outweighed...

We analyse a search model of the labour market in which firms and workers meet bilaterally and negotiate over wages in the presence of private information. We show that a fall in labour market frictions induces more aggressive wage bargaining behaviour, which in turn leads to a costly increase...