In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These “high-performance work systems” are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show...

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to...

The evidence suggests that relational contracting and legal rules play an important role incredit markets but on the basis of the prevailing field data it is difficult to pin down their causalimpact. Here we show experimentally that relational incentives are a powerful causaldeterminant for the...