The German law on employees' inventions requires employees to report to their employer any invention made in relation with the work contract. An employer claiming the right to the invention is obliged to pay a compensation to the employee. Up to now, this compensation is a matter of...

We analyze the legal reform concerning employees? inventions in Germany. Using a simple principal-agent model, we derive a unique efficient payment scheme: a bonus which is contingent on the project value. We demonstrate that the old German law creates inefficient incentives. However, the new...

Dieser Beitrag analysiert die geplante und zum Teil schon verwirklichte Reform des Gesetzes über Arbeitnehmererfindungen (ArbEG). Im Mittelpunkt der Analyse stehen die Vergütungen, die Arbeitgeber an einen Mitarbeiter zu zahlen haben, wenn sie dessen Erfindung in Anspruch nehmen. Bisher wurde...

This paper discusses the goal conflict between social protection and economic growth as well as employment. Taking the German economy as an example for the large continental economies of Old Europe, it analyzes twenty mechanisms that affect the fundamentals of the economy negatively and imply...

Often information structures are such that while individual reputation building is impossible groups of agents would have the possibility of building up a reputation. We experimentally examine whether groups of sellers in markets that suffer from moral hazard are able to build up reputations...

We examine a 'Rotten Kid' model (Becker 1974) where a player with social preferences interacts with an egoistic player. We assume that social preferences are intentionbased rather than outcome-based. In a very general multi-stage setting we show that any equilibrium must involve mutually unkind...

In order to deliver an innovation principals employ competing agents in some circumstances, while employing research team in other circumstances. This paper compares various structures of R&D to provide a rational behind this observation. It is assumed, that the principal can employ either one...

We consider guilt averse agents and principals and study the effects of guilt on optimal behavior of the principal and the agent in a moral hazard model. The principal's contract proposal contains a target effort in addition to the monetary incentive scheme. By accepting the agreement, the...

This paper contributes to the debate on the efficacy of IMF's catalytic finance in preventing financial crises. Extending Morris and Shin (2006), we consider that the IMF's intervention policy usually exerts a signaling effect on private creditors and that several interventions in sequence may...

A standard tournament contract specifies only tournament prizes. If agents' performance is measured on a cardinal scale, the principal can complement the tournament contract by a gap which defines the minimum distance by which the best performing agent must beat the second best to receive the...