Team production takes advantage of technological complementarities but comes with the cost of free-ridership. When workers differ in skills, the choice of sorting pattern may be associated with a nontrivial trade-off between exploiting the technological complementarities and minimizing the cost...

A single worker allocates her time among different projects which are progressively assigned. When the worker works on too many projects at the same time, the output rate decreases and completion time increases according to a law which we derive. We call this phenomenon "task juggling" and argue...

We study peer effects in the workplace. Specifically, we investigate whether, how, and why the productivity of a worker depends on the productivity of coworkers in the same team. Using high-frequency data on worker productivity from a large supermarket chain, we find strong evidence of positive...

Much of the existing theory of incentives describes a static relationship that lasts for just one transaction. This static assumption is not only unrealistic, but the resulting predictions appear to be at odds with many work organizations. The current paper introduces possible long-term...

A principal can observe both the output and input of an agent who works at a job involving multiple tasks. We provide a simple theory that explains why it may be optimal for the principal to use only an output-based incentive contract, even though the principal can monitor the agent's actions...