It is widely accepted in social psychology that the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem is a fundamental human motive. We incorporate this factor into an otherwise ordinary principal–agent framework and examine its impact on the optimal incentive scheme and the agent's behavior,...

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....

There is ample empirical evidence indicating that a substantial fraction of the population exhibits social preferences. Recent work also shows that social preferences influence the effectiveness of incentives in labor relations. Hence, when making contracting decisions, employers should take...

I consider a repeated principal-agent model with moral hazard, in which the agent has βδ-preferences, which are widely used to capture time-inconsistency. I analyze the case where the agent is sophisticated in the sense that he is fully aware of his inconsistent discounting. I characterize the...

We study a supply chain relationship in which the buyer outsources production of a component to the supplier. The buyer also produces a component and combines it with the supplier's input to yield the final output. The supplier can upgrade production of his input via costly innovation. Neither...

Informal monitors can sometimes substitute for formal law enforcement. Monitors hired to minimize cheating, however, are themselves vulnerable to collusion and extortion. I focus on one such informal monitor – the fair authorities at the trade fairs at Champagne – asking why the fairs...

We compare the ability of two common compensation structures, efficiency wages (EW) and deferred compensation (DC), at inducing effort from workers. We test predictions on effort provision and elicit preferences between the two wage structures. The theoretical predictions on effort are generally...

We investigate the costs and benefits of managerial interventions with a team in which workers care to different degrees about output. We show that if there are complementarities in production and if the team manager has some information about team members, interventions by the manager may have...