The evidence suggests that relational contracting and legal rules play an important role incredit markets but on the basis of the prevailing field data it is difficult to pin down their causalimpact. Here we show experimentally that relational incentives are a powerful causaldeterminant for the...

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to...

In this paper, we argue that important labor market phenomena can be better understood if one takes (i) the inherent incompleteness and relational nature of most employment contracts and (ii) the existence of reference-dependent fairness concerns among a substantial share of the population into...