This paper provides empirical evidence of favoritism by agents, where that favoritism is generated by social pressure. To do so, we explore the behavior of professional soccer referees. Referees have discretion over the addition of extra time at the end of a soccer game (called injury time), to...

This paper considers why non-monetary means of exchange, such as barter and the reciprocation of favors, are chosen by firms despite the usual benefits of monetary transactions. We consider the chosen means of exchange when both monetary and non-monetary exchange mechanisms are available. We...

Empirical work testing for a negative tradeoff between risk and incentives, a cornerstone of agency theory, has not had much success. Indeed, the data seem to suggest a positive relationship between measures of uncertainty and incentives, rather than the posited negative tradeoff. I argue that...

Performance evaluations for workers are typically subjective impressions held by supervisors rather than easily quantifiable measures of output. We argue that perhaps the most important aspect this is that it gives supervisors the opportunity to exercise their personal preference towards their...

with the compensation policies of firms. This literature is considered from the perspective of three major theories: human capital, learning, and incentives. Considerable empirical work has addressed each of these theories with some success. However, our understanding of the effect of...

I offer theoretical and empirical observations on the oversight of public sector employees. I argue that it is unreasonable to expect that the solutions typically considered in the literature will be effective with public sector employees, because bureaucrats are especially difficult to monitor....