We study strategic investment decisions in multi-stage contests with heterogeneous players. Our theoretical model of a round-robin rank-order tournament predicts that players conserve resources in a current contest to spend more in the subsequent contest if the degree of heterogeneity in the...

How should executives lead organisations and their employees in an increasingly digitalized business environment and what skills are needed to succeed? Although the evolution of digital technologies considerably changes working environments in organisations and creates new challenges for...

How should executives lead organisations and their employees in an increasingly digitalized business environment and what skills are needed to succeed? Although the evolution of digital technologies considerably changes working environments in organisations and creates new challenges for...

We study strategic investment decisions in multi-stage contests with heterogeneous players. Our theoretical model of a round-robin rank-order tournament predicts that players conserve resources in a current contest to spend more in the subsequent contest if the degree of heterogeneity in the...

This paper studies how pay transparency affects organizations that reward employees based on their efforts (i.e., using “subjective performance evaluation”). First, we show that transparency triggers social comparisons that require the organization to pay its employees an “envy premium”....

We address the question how much authority a principal should delegate to a manager with conflicting interests and uncertain ability in a context in which the manager has both compensation-based and reputational incentives. The optimal level of authority balances the value of the manager's...

We analyze a multitasking model with a verifiable routine task and a skill-dependent activity characterized by moral hazard. Contracts negotiated by firm/employee pairs follow from Nash bargaining. High- and low-skilled employees specialize, intermediate productivity employees perform both...

The paper examines of the division of labor within firms. It provides an explanation of the pervasive observed changes in work organisation away from the traditional functional departments and towards multi-tasking and job rotation. Whereas the exsisting literature on the division of labour...

We use the German Job Vacancy Survey to investigate whether firms are able to attract more suitable applicants by offering bargain wages rather than posting fixed wages. Contrary to the theoretical predictions provided by the literature, we find that the offer to bargain over pay decreases the...

We analyze the optimal contract between a risk-averse manager and the initial shareholders in a two-period model where the manager.s investment effort, carried out in period 1, and her current effort, carried out in period 2, both impact the second-period profit, so that it may be difficult to...