"Implicit Contracts, incentive compatibility, and involuntary unemployment" (MacLeod and Malcomson, 1989) remains our most highly cited work. We briefly review the development of this paper and of our subsequent related work, and conclude with reflections on the future of relational contract...

We develop a theory of incentives, wages, and employment in the context of team production. A central insight is that specialization and division of labor not only improve productivity but also increase effort and the sensitivity of effort to incentives under moral hazard. We show that...

How does organizational higher purpose affect employee behavior and firm output? We develop an optimal-contracting model which shows that pursuing organizational higher purpose dissipates agency frictions, lowers wage costs and elicits higher employee effort. The effect on profits, however,...

The paper analyzes how the choice of organizational structure leads to the best compromise between controlling behavior based on authority rights and minimizing costs for implementing high efforts. Concentrated delegation and hierarchical delegation turn out to be never an optimal compromise. If...

The authors empirically test Prendergast’s (2002) theory that incorporates the delegation of worker authority into the principal-agent model to explain the lack of consistent empirical support for a tradeoff between risk and incentives. Using data from the 1998 British WERS, the authors...

Over the past several decades, the federal procurement system in the United States has grown remarkably, and now totals over $500 billion annually. Over that same period, the rules governing federal procurement have been buffeted by broad efforts at reform. At no point, however, have we ever had...

The recent seminal work of Gabaix (2011) raises a puzzling question: If centralization-putting different projects under the same roof-reduces diversification for investors, how does this situation reconcile with the seemingly contradictory fact that it also boosts a firm's borrowing capacity? To...

This paper examines the optimal provision of incentives for contract designers. A principal hires an agent to draft a contract that is incomplete because the ex-ante specified design might not be appropriate ex-post. The degree of contract incompleteness is endogenously determined by the effort...

In Europe, many countries have completely separated their railways into totally separate infrastructure managers and railway undertakings (train operators) and the European Commission has sought to make such complete vertical separation a legal requirement.