We revisit job design with sequential tasks and outcome externalities from a different perspective, extending Schmitz (2013a). When two sequential tasks need to be performed by wealth-constrained agents, the principal can hire only one agent or two different agents. When there exists an outcome...

We examine the effect of single-sex schooling on students’ competitiveness by studying middle school students in Seoul who were randomly assigned to either single-sex or coeducational schools within their school districts. Contrary to popular belief and existing studies, our results suggest...

We investigate the relationship between tournament prices and effort choices in the presence of favoritism. High tournament prizes can decrease agents’ effort supply when the choice of the winner is not perfectly objective but affected to some extent by personal preferences of an evaluator.

We investigate under which circumstances bonus payments for managers are accepted as fair, asking workers to judge several hypothetical scenarios. We find that perceptions vary widely with the characteristics of the situation, as well as with the workers’ general attitudes.

Evidence from US data suggests that increases in parental education significantly steepen the slope of male experience–earnings profiles during early career years, other things equal.

We provide a simple asymmetric information model showing that, in contrast to portfolio diversification arguments, there is a natural complementarity between executive options and stock ownership. Moreover, managers can be made worse off by being granted more executive options.

Using panel data, we demonstrate a 50% increase in research productivity following a dramatic increase in the piece rate paid for articles by a major Chinese University. The increased productivity comes exclusively from those who were already research active.

We analyze a task-assignment model in which a principal assigns a task to one of two agents depending on future states. If the agents have concave utility, the principal assigns the task to them contingent on the state. We show that if the agents are loss averse, a state-independent...

This paper identifies a new sufficient condition for a prudent agent to have positive precautionary saving in the presence of labor income and interest rate risks of any size. We also provide three economic interpretations for this condition focusing respectively on the marginal effect of saving...

A linkage to reconcile measurable utility derived from intensity comparisons or from probability mixtures is provided in this note. This brief note is in honor of Lloyd Shapley whose relatively unknown seminal paper on measurable utility from axioms involving the fineness of perception offered a...