Group incentive systems have to overcome the free rider or 1/N problem, which gives workers an incentive to shirk, if they are to succeed. This paper uses new questions on responses to shirking from the General Social Survey and a special NBER survey of workers at over 300 worksites in 14...

Efficiency wage models have been criticized because worker malfeasance can be prevented in a pareto efficient manner by requiring workers to post a bond which they lose if they are caught cheating. However, since it is costly to monitor workers and costless to demand a larger bond, firms should...

Much recent thought has been devoted to the macroeconomic importance of the existence of wage contracts. Still, some puzzling features of the most conspicuous form of wage bargaining, that done formally by employers and labor unions, deserve further theoretical attention. Among these important...

Recent advances in AI represent improvements in prediction. We examine how decision-making and risk management strategies change when prediction improves. The adoption of AI may cause substitution away from risk management activities used when rules are applied (rules require always taking the...

Economic interactions, such as crowdfunding, often involve sequential actions, observational learning, and contingent project implementation. We incorporate all-or-nothing thresholds in a canonical model of information cascades. Early supporters effectively delegate their decisions to a...

Climate change increases weather variability, exacerbating agricultural risk in poor countries. Risk-averse farmers are unable to tailor their planting decisions to the coming season, and underinvest in profitable inputs. Accurate, long-range forecasts enable farmers to optimize for the season...

We use machine learning algorithms to construct a novel news-based index of US environmental and climate policy uncertainty (EnvPU) available on a monthly basis over the 1990-2019 period. We find that our EnvPU index spikes during the environmental spending disputes of the 1995-1996 government...

We develop a new approach to identify different categories of depositors during periods of uncertainty and quantify their compensation to remain in the bank. We isolate withdrawals due to liquidity needs, deterioration of fundamentals, and expectation about withdrawal behavior of other...

We examine innovative contexts like scientific research or technical R&D where agents must search across many potential projects of varying and uncertain returns. Is it better to possess incomplete but accurate data on the value of some projects, or might there be cases where it is better to...

Starting from Robbins (1952), the literature on experimentation via multi-armed bandits has wed exploration and exploitation. Nonetheless, in many applications, agents' exploration and exploitation need not be intertwined: a policymaker may assess new policies different than the status quo; an...