Tournament incentive schemes offer payments dependent on relative performance and are intended thereby to motivate agents to exert productive effort. Unfortunately, however, an agent may also be tempted to degrade the production of his competitors in order to improve the own relative position....

In a case study of Taiwan's tea industry during the Japanese colonial period, we identify an important function of middlemen: sorting. The transaction cost saved by the intermediary due to sorting is shown to be empirically significant. We also study other services provided by tea middlemen,...

Corporate actors differ from individuals in that it may be possible to observe the formation of the corporate will from outside, and to influence its formation. This feature can be exploited by regulators. One technique is inducing corporate actors to hire an interface actor, representing the...

We study the mechanics of leading by example in teams. Leadership is beneficial for the entire team when agents are conformists, i.e., dislike effort differentials. We also show how leadership can arise endogenously and discuss what type of leader benefits a team most.

Preindustrial Korea had little foreign trade in spite of the advantage of being a small peninsular country. We present a theory of political economy to show that the preindustrial Korean policy of suppressing private trade, like that of China, only can be explained by noneconomic factors such as...

We apply a model with two types of labour where each group decides on whether it prefers to be represented by an independent craft-specific labour union or by a joint union. Applying the asymmetric Nash bargaining solution, we find that it is beneficial for at least one group of labourers to...

This paper compares two alternative incentive schemes, performance-related pay (PRP) and relative performance evaluation (RPE), in a differentiated duopoly where institutional features constrain firms to pay workers a given salary. It is shown that RPE endogenously arises as the optimal choice...

We offer a unified framework to analyse the determination of employment, employee effort, wages, and profit sharing when firms face stochastic revenue shocks. We apply a generalized Nash bargaining solution, which extends the wage bargaining literature by incorporating efficiency-wage...

Recent evidence from the field (Hossain and List, 2009) suggests that contracts framed in terms of a loss (a deduction is taken for failing to meet a threshold) lead to greater effort than contracts framed in terms of a gain (a bonus is given for meeting a threshold). We investigate two...

The present paper analyzes the role of severance payments in optimal labor contracts, employing an efficiency-wage model with two-sided moral hazard. We show how employers commit to job security for their workers by using severance payments, but that in general, employees are not fully...