Tournaments, reward structures based on rank order, are compared with individual contracts in a model with one risk-neutral principal and many risk-averse agents. Each agents' output is a stochastic function of his effort level plus an additive shock term that is common to all the agents. The...

This paper studies the efficient agreements about the dependence of workers' earnings on employment, when the employment level is controlled by firms. Under plausible assumptions, such agreements will cause employment to diverge from efficiency as a byproduct of their attempt to mitigate risk....