If agents are exposed to continual competitive pressure, how does a short-term variation of the severity of the competition affect agents' performance? In a real-effort laboratory experiment, we study a one-time increase in incentives in a sequence of equally incentivized contests. Our results...

We show that concerns for fairness may have dramatic consequences for the optimal provision of incentives in a moral hazard context. Incentive contracts that are optimal when there are only selfish actors become inferior when some agents are concerned about fairness. Conversely, contracts that...

The marginal cost of effort often increases as effort is exerted. In a dynamic moral hazard setting, dynamically increasing costs create information asymmetry. This paper characterizes the optimal contract and helps explain the popular yet thus far puzzling use of non-linear incentives, for...