We study, theoretically and empirically, the effects of incentives on the self-selection and coordination of motivated agents to produce a social good. Agents join teams where they allocate effort to either generate individual monetary rewards (selfish effort) or contribute to the production of...

Principal-agent models take outside options, determining participation and incentive constraints, as given. We construct a general equilibrium model where workers' reservation wages and the maximum punishment acceptable before workers quit are instead determined endogenously. We simultaneously...

Credence goods markets – like for health care or repair services – with their informational asymmetries between sellers and customers are prone to fraudulent behavior of sellers and resulting market inefficiencies. We present the first model that considers both diagnostic uncertainty of...

This paper studies how litigation and settlement behavior is affected by agents motivated by spiteful preferences under the American and the English fee-shifting rule. We conduct an experiment and find that litigation expenditures and settlement requests are higher for more spiteful...

The widespread use of markets leads to unprecedented material well-being in many societies. We study whether market interaction, as a side effect, erodes moral values. An encompassing understanding of the virtues and vices of markets, including their possible impact on moral values, is necessary...

This paper studies contracting between a principal and multiple agents. The setup is classical except for the assumption that agents have interdependent preferences. We characterize cost effective contracts, and relate the direction of co-movement in rewards -- "joint liability" (positive) or...

This paper considers games in which multiple principals contract simultaneously with the same agent. We introduce a new class of revelation mechanisms that, although it does not always permit a complete equilibrium characterization, it facilitates the characterization of the equilibrium outcomes...

This paper considers dynamic games in which multiple principals contract sequentially and non-cooperatively with the same agent. We first show that when contracting is private, i.e. when downstream principals observe neither the mechanisms offered upstream nor the decisions taken in these...

We illustrate, by means of two examples, why assuming the principals offer simple menus (i.e. collections of payoff-relevant alternatives) as opposed to more general mechanisms may preclude a complete characterization of the set of equilibrium outcomes in certain sequential contracting...