This paper examines individual decision making when decisions reflect on people's ability to learn. The authors address this problem in the context of a manager making investment decisions on a project over time. They show that, in an effort to appear as a fast learner, the manager will...

Bureaucracies tend to be used when consumers cannot be trusted to choose outcomes efficiently. But a primary means of bureaucratic oversight is consumer complaints. But this can give bureaucrats an incentive to inefficiently accede to consumer demands to avoid a complaint. I show that when this...

Empirical work testing for a negative trade-off between risk and incentives has not had much success: the data suggest a positive relationship between measures of uncertainty and incentives rather than the posited negative trade-off. I argue that the existing literature fails to account for an...

Objective measures of employee performance are rarely available. Instead, firms rely on subjective judgments by supervisors. Subjectivity opens the door to favoritism, where evaluators act on personal preferences toward subordinates to favor some employees over others. Firms must balance the...