Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

Several empirical findings have challenged the traditional view on the trade-off between risk and incentives. By combining risk aversion and limited liability in a standard principal-agent model the empirical puzzle on the positive relationship between risk and incentives can be explained....

Partnerships are the prevalent organizational form in many industries. Most partnerships share profits equally among the partners. Following Kandel and Lazear (1992) it is often argued that "peer pressure" mitigates the arising free-rider problem. This line of reasoning takes the equal sharing...

Tournaments have been objected as resulting from ad hoc restrictions to the contracting problem which are not easily justified. Taking into account that a performance measure might not be verifiable to a third party, however, a restriction to payments which sum up to a constant may be...

While most market transactions are subject to strong incentives, transactions within Firms are often not incentivized. We offer an explanation for this observation based on envy among agents in an otherwise standard moral hazard model with multiple agents. Envious agents suffer if other agents...

This note demonstrates how performance measure congruity and noise determine an agency’s total surplus within an linear agency framework with multiple tasks. It provides a decomposition of agency costs, leading back to a congruity index previously proposed in the literature. In addition,...

This paper investigates the role of variance analysis procedures in aligning objectives under the condition of distorted performance measurement. A riskneutral agency with linear contracts is analyzed, whereby the agent receives postcontract, pre-decision information on his productivity. If the...

This paper analyzes the use of alternative performance measures in an agency model in which contracting incorporates both formal and informal agreements. It is shown that under a proper use of verifiable and unverifiable performance measures, the two types of contracts are complements,...

We analyze a two-period agency problem with limited liability and nonverifiable information. The principal commits to a dynamic bonus pool comprising a fixed total payment that may be distributed over time to the agent and a third party. We find that the optimal two-period contract features...