We analyze optimal incentive contracts in a model where the probability of court enforcement is determined by the costs spent on contracting. We show that contract costs matter for incentive provision, both in static spot contracts and repeated game relational contracts. We find that social...

The extent to which a knowledge-intensive firm should induce cooperation between its employees is analyzed in a model of relational contracting between a firm (principal) and its employees (two agents). The agents can cooperate by helping each other, i.e. provide effort that increases the...

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Asset specificity is usually considered to be an argument for vertical integration. The main idea is that specificity induces opportunistic behavior, and that vertical integration reduces the cost of preventing opportunism. In this paper I show that asset specificity can be an argument for...

In many tournaments it is the contestants themselves who determine reward allocation. Labor-union members bargain over wage distribution, and many firms allow self-managed teams to freely determine internal resource allocation, incentive structure, and division of labour. We analyze, and test...

Why does individual performance pay seem to prevail in human-capital-intensive industries where teamwork is so common? We present a model that aims to explain this. In a repeated game model of relational contracting, we analyze the conditions for implementing peerdependent incentive regimes when...

We analyze a situation where common noise makes compensation based on relative performance evaluation (RPE) desirable, but where the agents' ability to hold-up values ex post obstruct the implementation of optimal RPE schemes. The principal can take actions to constrain the agents' hold-up power...