More often than not production processes are the joint endeavor of people having different abilities and productivities. Such production processes and the associated surplus production are often not fully transparent in the sense that the relative contributions of involved agents are blurred;...

Although physicians are often expected to be gatekeepers to health insurance benefits such as paid sick leave, research indicates a substantial reluctance to reject patient requests for sickness certificates. We show that private information on the patient's part creates a conflict between the...

We develop a rationale for the payment by firms of a wage premium on marginal, or overtime, weekly hours. We examine wage-hours contracts within the framework of a two-period specific human capital model with asymmetric information. The wage premium serves to achieve contract efficiency. For...

This paper studies how asymmetric information over inputs affects workers' response to incentives and self-selection at the workplace. Using daily records from a Peruvian egg production plant, we exploit a sudden change in the worker salary structure and find that workers' effort, firm profits,...

Why do farm households inefficiently allocate resources across the plots they cultivate? We explore how these production inefficiencies relate to consumption decisions and information sharing within the household. In a lab-in-the-field experiment, male producers allocate too few inputs to their...

The social and the private returns to education differ when education can increase productivity, and also be used to signal productivity. We show how instrumental variables can be used to separately identify and estimate the social and private returns to education within the employer learning...

This paper discusses the strategic role of mismatching, where players voluntarily form inefficient teams or forego the formation of efficient teams, respectively. Strategic mismatching can be rational when players realize a competitive advantage (e.g. harming other competitors). In addition, the...