This paper examines the effect of imperfect labor market competition on the efficiency of compensation schemes in a setting with moral hazard and risk-averse agents, who have private information on their productivity. Two vertically differentiated firms compete for agents by offering contracts...

Tournaments are widely used in organizations, explicitly or implicitly, to reward the best-performing employees, e.g., through promotion or bonuses, and to punish the worst-performing employees, e.g., through firing or unfavorable job assignments. We use a principal-agent model to compare the...

Managers often use tournaments which motivate workers to compete for the top, compete to avoid the bottom, or both. In this paper we compare the effectiveness and efficiency of the corresponding incentive schemes. To do so, we utilize optimal contracts in a principal-agent setting, using a...

We analyze the impact of social comparison on optimal contract design under imperfect labor market competition for managerial talent. Adding a disutility of social comparison as induced by a ranking of verifiable efforts to the multi-task model by Bénabou and Tirole (2016), we demonstrate that...

Previous work has shown that unobservable random shocks on output have a detrimental effect on effort provision in short-term ('static') employment relationships. Given the prevalence of long-term ('dynamic') relationships in firms, we investigate whether the impact of shocks is similarly...

We study the effects of communication in an experimental tournament between teams. When teams, rather than individuals, compete for a prize there is a need for intra-team coordination in order to win the inter-team competition. Introducing communication in such situations may have ambiguous...

We study experimentally the relationship between intra-firm wage dispersion chosen by principals and workers' performance. Principals show a preference for more egalitarian wage schemes, and workers are negatively influenced by high levels of wage inequality. -- wage dispersion ; effort ;...

This paper investigates whether a designer can improve both the incentive provision and the selection performance of a promotion contest by making the competition more (or less) dynamic. A comparison of static (one-stage) and dynamic (two-stage) contests reveals that this is not the case. A...

This paper investigates the implications of different prize structures on effort provision in dynamic (two-stage) elimination contests. Theoretical results show that, for risk-neutral participants, a structure with a single prize for the winner of the contest maximizes total effort, while a...

This paper examines the effect of imperfect labor market competition on the efficiency of compensation schemes in a setting with moral hazard and risk-averse agents who have private information on their ability. Two heterogenous firms - characterized by vertical, respectively horizontal,...