We study behavior within a simple principal--agent experiment. Our design allows for a large class of linear contracts. Principals can offer any feasible combination of (negative) fixed wages and incentives in the form of return sharing. This great contractual flexibility allows us to study...

The most influential theory of corporate governance, principal agency theory, does not take into consideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate and transfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in order to overcome the widespread corporate scandals, the interests of...

Previous experimental work provides encouraging support for some of the central assumptions underlying Hart and Moore (2008)’s theory of contractual reference points. However, existing studies ignore realistic aspects of trading relationships such as informal agreements and ex post...

Recently, a number of authors have argued that the standard search model cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies, given shocks of a plausible magnitude. We use data on the cost of vacancy creation and cyclicality of wages to identify...

Using information on job changes and search behavior of workers and controlling for endogenous mobility we study firm-size wage differentials in Switzerland. We find that the observed cross-sectional firm size premium cannot be explained exclusively by worker heterogeneity. Almost 50 % of the...

In this paper we provide experimental evidence indicating that incentive contracts may cause a strong crowding out of reciprocity-driven voluntary cooperation. This crowding out effect constitutes costs of incentive provision that have been largely neglected by economists. In our experiments the...

We examine experimentally how Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) respond to incentives and how they provide incentives in situations requiring trust and trustworthiness. As a control we compare the behavior of CEOs with the behavior of students. We find that CEOs are considerably more trusting and...

We study the impact of reputational incentives in markets characterized by moral hazard problems. Social preferences have been shown to enhance contract enforcement in these markets, while at the same time generating considerable wage and price rigidity. Reputation powerfully amplifies the...

“Evaluitis” - i.e. ex post assessments of organizations and persons - has become a rapidly spreading disease. In addition to the well-known costs imposed on evaluees and evaluators, additional significant costs are commonly disregarded: incentives are distorted, ossification is induced and...

We conducted a randomized field experiment to examine how workers respond to wage cuts, and whether their response depends on the wages paid to coworkers. Workers were assigned to teams of two, performed identical individual tasks, and received the same performance‐independent hourly wage....