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A central goal of any economy is to achieve rapid and sustained growth. This cannot happen without continued innovation. This landmark Handbook brings together many of the world’s legal scholars to examine features of the legal infrastructure that affect both innovation and growth....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011171977
It is often suggested that incentive schemes under moral hazard can be gamed by an agent with superior knowledge of the environment, and that deliberate lack of transparency about the incentive scheme can reduce gaming.  We formally investigate these arguments.  Ambiguous incentive schemes...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011004313
We investigate why people keep their promises in the absence of external enforcement mechanisms and reputational effects. In a controlled laboratory experiment we show that exogenous variation of second-order expectations (promisors' expectations about promisees' expectations that the promise...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011252589
Consumer search is not only costly but also tiring. We characterize the intertemporal effects that search fatigue has on oligopoly prices, product proliferation, and the provision of consumer assistance (i.e., advice). These effects vary based on whether search is all-or-nothing or sequential in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009652887
We analyze costly information acquisition and information revelation in groups in a dynamic setting. Even when group members have perfectly aligned interests the group may inefficiently delay decisions. When deadlines are far away, uninformed group members freeride on each others' efforts to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009246605
In this paper we show that subtle forms of deceit undermine the effectiveness of incentives. We design an experiment in which the principal has an interest in underreporting the true performance difference between the agents in a dynamic tournament. According to the standard approach, rational...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005822257
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008519829
Contract Theory by Patrick Bolton and Mathias Dewatripont, a comprehensive textbook on contract theory suitable for use at the graduate and advanced undergraduate levels, covers the areas of agency theory, information economics, and organization theory and presents many applications in all areas...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10004973219
This paper argues that the prevalence of compensation systems which reward winners without explicitly identifying losers can be rationalized by workers` concern for relative payoffs. If the workers` participation constraints are binding, the firm must compensate its employees for the disutility...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005047936
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