We run a public good experiment in the field and in the lab with (partly) the same subjects. The field experiment is a true natural field experiment as subjects do not know that they are exposed to an experimental variation. We can show that subjects' behavior in the classic lab public good...

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....

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...

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...

The industrialization process of a country is often plagued by a failure to coordinate investment decisions. Using the Global Games approach we can solve this coordination problem and eliminate the problem of multiple equilibria. We show how appropriate information provision enhances efficiency....

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...

We use a unique hand collected data set of 6,258 auctions from the online football manager game Hattrick to study determinants and effects of reserve prices. We find that chosen reserve prices exhibit both very sophisticated and suboptimal behavior by the sellers. On the one hand, reserve prices...

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 compensationbased and reputational incentives. The optimal level of authority balances the value of the manager’s...