Synergies in production are ubiquitous in shared production processes such as those involving individuals within a team, departments within a firm, or industries within a country. Using a weakest link game with ex post bargaining to redistribute the joint surplus, we study a situation in which...

We explore the intersection of growth theory and the theory of the firm with an experiment. Economic growth is possible in our experiment when agents specialize to exploit increasing returns. We find that low opportunity costs are sufficient for Marshallian internal economies, but that...

This paper develops a positive model of informal contracting in which rewards and punishments are not determined by an ex ante optimal plan but instead express the ex post moral sentiments of the arbitrating party. We consider a subjective performance evaluation problem in which a principal can...

Prior work in business experimentation concludes that involving other stakeholders besides the entrepreneur mitigates the challenge of biased experimental decision-making. However, this work also maintains a key simplifying assumption—that the actors involved have a common goal to maximize...

We discuss the literatures on behavioral economics, bounded rationality and experimental economics as they apply to firm behaviour in markets. Topics discussed include the impact of imitative and satisficing behavior by firms, outcomes when managers care about their position relative to peers,...

A large and growing literature has demonstrated that explicit incentives, such as enforceable contracts, can lead agents to withhold effort. We investigate when this behavioral result arises. In an extensive laboratory experiment, we find that imposing control through an enforceable contract is...

Work and trade relationships are often governed by relational contracts, in which incentives for cooperative action today stem from the prospective future benefits of the relationship. In this paper, we study how reductions in clarity about the financial consequences of actions, induced by...

Work and trade relationships are often governed by relational contracts, in which incentives for cooperative action today stem from the prospective future benefits of the relationship. In this paper, we study how reductions in clarity about the financial consequences of actions, induced by...

Many basic economic theories with perfectly functioning markets do not predict the existence of the vast number of microenterprises readily observed across the world. We put forward a model that illuminates why financial and managerial capital constraints may impede experimentation, and thus...

Groups, companies, and organizations identify themselves via symbols. Symbols have the potential to create group identity and at the same time create group boundaries, thus allowing for achieving the benefits of cooperation by ingroup members. We use a laboratory experiment to study the role of...