Holmström?s (1982/99) career concerns model has become an important workhorse for the analysis of agency issues in many fields. The underlying signal jamming argument requires players to use information in a Bayesian way – which may or may not reasonably approximate real-life decision makers?...

Free riding in team production arises because individual effort is not perfectly observable. It seems natural to suppose that greater transparency would enhance incentives. Therefore, it is puzzling that team production often lacks transparency about individual contributions despite negligible...

Young professionals typically do not enter into life-long employment relations with a single firm. Therefore, future employers can learn about individuals' abilities from the observable facts regarding earlier work relations. We show that these informational spill-overs have profound...

To innovate, employees need to develop novel ideas and coordinate with each other to turn these ideas into better products and services. Work outcomes provide signals about employees' abilities to the labor market, and therefore career concerns arise. These can both be 'good' (enhancing...

An essential ingredient in models of career concerns is ex ante uncertainty about an agent's type. This paper shows how career concerns can arise even in the absence of any such ex ante uncertainty, if the unobservable actions that an agent takes influence his future productivity. By...

In many economic situations several principals contract with the same agents sequentially. Asymmetric learning about agents' abilities provides the first principal with an informational advantage and has profound implications for the design of incentive contracts. We show that the principal...

To innovate, employees need to develop novel ideas and coordinate with each other to turn these ideas into better products and services. Work outcomes provide signals about employees' abilities to the labor market, and therefore career concerns arise. These can both be 'good' (enhancing...

An essential ingredient in models of career concerns is ex ante uncertainty about an agent’s type. This paper shows how career concerns can arise even in the absence of any such ex ante uncertainty, if the unobservable actions that an agent takes influence his future productivity. By...