Employers want motivated and productive employees. Are there ways to increase employee motivation without relying solely on monetary incentives, such as pay-for-performance schemes? One tool that has shown promise in recent decades for improving worker performance is setting goals, whether they...

In this paper we investigate whether the framing of the incentives used to foster participation into contexts characterized by high degrees of time pressure affects individuals' self-selection. At this aim we run a lab-in-the-field experiment structured in two parts. The first part investigates...

We study dynamic moral hazard when the principal can only commit to spot contracts. Principal and agent are ex ante symmetrically uncertain about the difficulty of the job, and update their beliefs on observing output. Since the agent's effort is private, he has an additional incentive to shirk...

We study dynamic moral hazard with symmetric ex ante uncertainty about the difficulty of the job. The principal and agent update their beliefs about the difficulty as they observe output. Effort is private and the principal can only offer spot contracts. The agent has an additional incentive to...

The inclination of individuals to improve their performance when it lags behind that of others with whom they naturally compare themselves can be harnessed to optimize the individuals' effort in work and study. In a given set of individuals, we characterize each individual by his relative...

The inclination of individuals to improve their performance when it lags behind that of others with whom they naturally compare themselves can be harnessed to optimize the individuals' effort in work and study. In a given set of individuals, we characterize each individual by his relative...

The inclination of individuals to improve their performance when it lags behind that of others with whom they naturally compare themselves can be harnessed to optimize the individuals’ effort in work and study. In a given set of individuals, we characterize each individual by his relative...