Many incentives in organizations arise not through explicit formal incentive contracts but rather implicitly through career concerns. This paper models career concerns through agents trying to manipulate the market assessment of their future productivity. The information flow from current...

This paper analyzes contracts as means of strategic commitment against outside parties. It considers the ex ample of an incumbent firm that enters a contractual relationship wit h its workers in order to deter entry. The parties cannot precommit n ot to renegotiate the contract once entry has...

This paper uses a simple multitask career concern model in order to analyze the incentives of government agency officials. Incentives are impaired by the agency pursuing multiple missions. A lack of focus is even more problematic in the case of fuzzy missions, that is when outsiders are...

We show how the willingness-to-pay problem and lack of exclusivity in sovereign lending may result in an equilibrium sovereign debt structure that is excessively difficult to restructure. A bankruptcy regime for sovereigns can alleviate this inefficiency but only if it is endowed with...

This paper extends the analysis of transactions cost models of vertical integration to multilateral settings. Its main fo cus is on supply assurance concerns that arise when several downstream firms are competing for inputs in limited supply. Integration reduce s supply assurance concerns for an...

The authors analyze incomplete long-term financial contracts between an entrepreneur with no initial wealth and a wealthy investor. Both agents have potentially conflicting objectives, the entrepreneur cares about both pecuniary and nonpecuniary returns from the project while the investor is...

We propose a model of equilibrium contracting between two agents who are "boundedly rational" in the sense that they face time costs of deliberating current and future transactions. We show that equilibrium contracts may be incomplete and assign control rights: they may leave some enforceable...

We propose a model of costly decision making based on time-costs of deliberating current and future decisions. We model an individual decision-maker's thinking process as a thought-experiment that takes time, and lets the decision maker 'think ahead' about future decision problems in yet...