Due to technological progress, recent performance is often more informative about future performance prospects than is older performance. We incorporate information decay in a career concern model in which performance depends on type and effort and contract renewal is based on the performance...

Law-breaking activities within an organization benefiting the firm at the expense of the general public are widespread but difficult to uncover, making whistleblowing by employees desirable. We employ a novel laboratory experiment to investigate if and how monetary incentives and expectations of...

The procurement of an innovation involves motivating a research effort to generate a new idea and then implementing that idea efficiently. If research efforts are unverifiable and implementation costs are private information, a trade-off arises between the two objectives. The optimal mechanism...

We derive a theoretical model of effort in the presence of career concern based on the multi-unit all-pay auction, and closely inspired by the Italian academic market. In this model, the number of applicants, the number of new posts, and the relative importance of the determinants of promotion...

We consider multiple-principal multiple-agent models of moral hazard: Principals compete through mechanisms in the presence of agents who take unobservable actions. In this context, we provide a rationale for restricting principals to make use of simple mechanisms, which correspond to direct...

This paper investigates behavior in the Traveler's Dilemma game and isolates deviations from textbook predictions caused by differences in welfare perceptions and strategic miscalculations. It presents the results of an experimental analysis based on a 2x2 design where the own and the other...

There may be a nexus between card games and financial markets. Akerlof and Shiller (2010) ask whether the decline in the number of bridge players and the growth in the number of poker players may have led to the current bad financial traders' practices which are responsible for the global...

Natural disasters have been shown to produce effects on social capital, risk and time preferences of victims. We run experiments on altruistic, time and risk preferences on a sample of Sri Lankan microfinance borrowers affected/unaffected by the tsunami shock in 2004 at a 7-year distance from...

We show how repeatedly awarded procurement contracts where unverifiable quality dimensions are relevant can be reinterpreted as relational contracts between a buyer and a contractor that is threatened by a potentially less efficient competitor. We compare two scenarios: 1) Under freedom of...