This study explores a nested representation of ethical, moral, social identity, motivated, opportunistic and reciprocal agent preferences to characterize screening contracts in a principal–agent model under adverse selection. This leads to a ranking of the type of social preferences that...

We develop a principal–agent model with a moral hazard problem in which the principal has access to a hard signal (the level of output) and a soft behavioral signal (the supervision signal) about the agent's level of effort. In our model, the agent can initiate influence activities and...

Conventional wisdom suggests that a global increase in monetary rewards should induce agents to exert higher effort. In this paper we demonstrate that this may not hold in team settings. In the context of sequential team production with positive externalities between agents, incentive reversal...

I develop a model to study how financial institution differences across countries affect the offshoring decision of Northern firms and whether a product cycle arises when the only comparative advantage of Northern suppliers is their access to better financial institutions. A Northern final-good...

This paper studies the interplay between economic incentives and social norms in firms. We introduce a general framework to model social norms arguing that norms stem from agents’ desire for, or peer pressure towards, social efficiency. In a simple model of team production we examine the...

This paper provides an explanation for why many organizations are concerned with “e-mail overload” and implement policies to restrict the use of e-mail in the office. In a theoretical model we formalize the tradeoff between increased productivity from high priority communication and reduced...

Based on data from Chilean construction projects, we evaluate how the boundary choice of a focal activity is affected by the number of activities integrated elsewhere in a project and by the level of “between complexity” and “within complexity” of those activities. Our results show that...

An evolutionary tool kit is applied in this paper to explain how innate social behavior traits evolved in early human groups. These traits were adapted to the particular production requirements of the group in human phylogeny. They shaped the group members’ attitudes towards contributing to...

This paper proposes a theory of sharecropping on the basis of price behavior in agriculture and imperfectly competitive nature of rural product markets. First we show the superiority of sharecropping over fixed rental contracts in a benchmark landlord–tenant model with seasonal variation of...

We consider the problem of an employer who has to choose whether to reemploy agents with a positive track record or agents who were unsuccessful. While previously successful managers are likely to be of high ability, they have also accumulated wealth and will be harder to motivate in the future....