competition for principals or agents. While we do observe substantial and significant ratchet effects in the baseline (no … competition) case of our model, we find that ratchet behavior is nearly eliminated by labor-market competition; interestingly this … is true regardless of whether market conditions favor principals or agents. -- Ratchet effect ; competition ; experiment …

"We devise an experiment to explore the effect of different degrees of competition on optimal contracts in a hidden … principals. We first show theoretically how these different degrees of competition affect outcomes and efficiency. Informational … relative number of agents because competition reduces the agents' informational monopoly power. However, this environment also …