The purpose of this note is to explore the problem of non-convex labor supply decision in an economy with reciprocity in labor relations ("gift exchange") a la Danthine and Kurmann (2010), and explicitly perform the aggregation presented in Vasilev (2017) without a formal proof, and thus provide...

Should principals explain and justify their evaluations? In this paper the principal's evaluation is private information, but she can provide justification by sending a costly cheap-talk message. I show that the principal explains her evaluation to the agent if the evaluation turns out to be...

Dismissal rules, i.e. legally enforced long term contracts, have beem defended against criticism for, among other things, providing efficient incentives to invest in relationship specific skills. However, in many situations efficient investment can also be attained by spot contracts. We...

In three experiments, we examine how an employer reputation system disciplines an online labor market (Amazon Mechanical Turk) in which employers may decline to pay workers while keeping their work product. These three experiments test the value of the employer reputation system for workers,...

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...

We consider a model of endogenous human capital formation with competitively determined wages, where discrimination between ex ante identical groups is sustainable in equilibrium. An affirmative action policy consisting of a quota may "fail" in the sense that there still may be equilibria where...

In this note I give a full characterization of all deterministic direct mechanisms in the public good provision problem with independent private values that are dominant strategy incentive compatible, ex-post individually rational, and ex-post budget balanced.

In this paper we analyze the frequently observed phenomenon that (i) some members of a team ('black sheep') exhibit behavior disliked by other (honest) team members, who (ii) nevertheless refrain from reporting such misbehavior to the authorities (they set up a 'wall of silence'). Much cited...

Consider a mechanism for the binary public good provision problem that is dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC), ex-post individually rational (EPIR), and ex-post budget balanced (EPBB). Suppose this mechanism has the additional property that the utility from participating in the...

Interactions between players with private information and opposed interests are often prone to bad advice and inefficient outcomes, e.g. markets for financial or health care services. In a deception game we investigate experimentally which factors could improve advice quality. Besides advisor...