Empirical studies of the principal-agent relationship find that extrinsic incentives work in many instances, linking rewards to performance increases effort, but that they can also backfire, reducing effort. Intrinsic motivation, the internal drive to work to master a skill or to improve one's...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

This paper studies the prevalence and nature of zero-hours contracts (ZHCs) in the UK labour market. The headline count of ZHC workers based on the Labour Force Survey has long underestimated and continues to underestimate the number of workers in ZHC or ZHC-like jobs. ZHC jobs and workers are...