A standard tournament contract specifies only tournament prizes. If agents’ performance is measured on a cardinal scale, the principal can complement the tournament contract by a gap which defines the minimum distance by which the best performing agent must beat the second best to receive the...

Mandatory profit sharing can represent a Pareto-improvement if labour supply is excessive due to relative consumption effects. Profit sharing reduces wages. If the rise in profit income keeps total income constant, there will only be a Pareto-improving substitution effect.

I study the evolution of reciprocity in a gift-exchange game. In equilibrium, wage offers induce maximal effort but there is strong inequity in favor of the workers. The result suggests that norm-based efficiency wages may be unstable over time.

Kim (1995) provides a sufficient condition to rank information systems when the first-order approach is valid. The basis for the condition is the comparison of the likelihood ratio distributions. I show, first, that Kim’s criterion is not necessary when the limited liability of the agent...

This paper focuses on the size of the borrower group in group lending. We show that, when social ties in a community enhance borrowers’ incentives to exert effort, a profit-maximizing financier chooses a group of limited size. Borrowers that would be fundable under moral hazard but have...

The selection of individuals into a school or job or team may be made early based on the expected skills. For instance, children are selected into an academic or a vocational education track at early ages in Germany and other European countries. The paper considers the effects of such early...

In an agency model with moral hazard and limited liability, we show that the provision of perks can be inefficient, even if perks are contractible. Interestingly, there can be over- as well as underinvestment in perks. We also demonstrate that perks may actually harm the agent, although perks...

I study the institution of avoiding hiring one’s own Ph.D. graduates for assistant professorships. I argue that this institution is necessary to create better incentives for researchers to incorporate new information in studies, facilitating the convergence to asymptotic learning of the...

Economic theory predicts that reciprocal brokered deposits, by enhancing deposit insurance coverage, may reduce market discipline for banks, permitting them to take more risk in various dimensions. A newly available dataset provides empirical evidence related to that hypothesis.

Without sacrificing tractability, we analyze the effect of fat-tailed events such as catastrophes on the optimal compensation contract between a principal and an agent. The optimal contract depends on all the moments and not just the variance.