In many environments, tournaments can elicit more effort from workers, except perhapswhen workers can sabotage each other. Because it is hard to separate effort, ability andoutput in many real workplace settings, the empirical evidence on the incentive effect oftournaments is thin...

The importance of fair and equal treatment of workers is at the heart of the debate in organizational management. In this regard, we study how reward mechanisms and production technologies affect effort provision in teams. Our experimental results demonstrate that unequal rewards can potentially...

The existing delegation literature has focused on different preferences of principal and agent concerning project selection, which makes delegating authority costly for the principal. This paper shows that delegation has a cost even when the preferences of principal and agent are exogenously...

We study how help can be fostered by means of a team bonus in the presence of rank-order tournaments. In a simple model we combine elements of relative rewards and a team bonus and study their effect on effort, help and sabotage. Quite intuitively the theoretical analysis suggests that team...

We study, how help can be fostered under relative rewards by means of team bonus and corporate value statements. A simple model analysis suggests that team members help less as relative rewards increase. As one potential measure to encourage help, we augment relative rewards with team rewards...

Efforts to insure long-tenured displacement workers against earnings losses from unemployment spells and lower wages on subsequent jobs have led to an array of government and employer programs. A policy typology is proposed to impose order on these programmatic efforts. The basic typology...

Unemployment insurance replacement rates world-wide are well below 100 percent, a fact often attributed to search moral hazard concerns. As Blanchard and Tirole (2008) have illustrated, however, neither search nor layoff moral hazard (firing cost) distortions need arise in first-best insurance...

Job displacement in the U.S. is a serious threat to the earnings of long-tenured workers, through both (i) unemployment spells and (ii) reduced reemployment wages. Although full insurance requires both unemployment benefits and wage insurance, supply difficulties limit actual-loss insurance, and...

By relaxing the common efficiency wage assumption of exogenous shirking detection probabilities, we demonstrate how standards and efficiency wages are related. In a more general setting where the probability of detection depends upon the equilibrium effort level of non-shirkers, we show that the...

Unemployment insurance experts lament the low Federal taxable wage base (TWB), last increased to $7000 per worker in 1982. The Federal TWB sets only a system minimum and by 2014 all but two states had TWBs that exceeded the minimum, opening up state TWB choice for study. States do align TWB with...