Two firms, each consisting of a team with the owner and just oneemployee, compete on the labor market with free labor mobility. Afterobserving the investment decisions by firm owners their employees canengage in costly training, thus increasing their general and firm-specificproductivity, which...

The existing literature acknowledges that a mismatch between the experimenter's and the subjects' models of an experimental task can adversely affect the interpretation of data from laboratory experiments. We discuss why the two common experimental designs (between-subjects and within-subjects)...

The existing literature acknowledges that a mismatch between the experimenter's and the subjects' models of an experimental task can adversely affect the interpretation of data from laboratory experiments. We discuss why the two common experimental designs (between-subjects and within-subjects)...

Recent literature has questioned the existence of a learning foundationfor the partially cursed equilibrium. This paper closes the gap by showingthat a partially cursed equilibrium corresponds to a particular analogy-based expectation equilibrium.

In line with the widely applied principle of just deserts, we assume that the severityof the penalty on a contract offender increases in the harm on the other. Whenthis principle holds, the influence of the efficiency of the agreement on the incentivesto abide by it crucially depends on whether...

Can two negotiators fail to agree when both the size of the surplus and the rationalityof the negotiators are common knowledge? We show that the answer is affirmative.When the negotiators can make irrevocable commitments at a low but positive cost,the unique symmetric equilibrium entails...

We consider guilt averse agents and principals and study the effects ofguilt on optimal behavior of the principal and the agent in a moral hazardmodel.The principal’s contract proposal contains a target effort in addition tothe monetary incentive scheme. By accepting the agreement, the...

Experiments suggest that communication increases the contribution topublic goods (Ledyard, 1995). There is also evidence that, when contemplatinga lie, people trade off their private benefit from the lie with theharm it inflicts on others (Gneezy, 2005). We develop a model of bilateralpre-play...

We model deferred compensation as a share of an uncertain futureprofit granted by a financially constrained employer to her employeein mutual agreement. Deferred compensation serves as a retentionmechanism, helping the employer to avoid bankruptcy. The optimalcombination of cash and deferred...

A robust nding of repeated public goods experiments is that high initialcontribution rates sharply decline towards the end. This paper reports onan exploratory experiment designed to discover whether such a decline is simply triggered by the usual experimental practice of publicly informing...