Several empirical findings have challenged the traditional trade-off between risk and incentives. By combining risk aversion and limited liability in a standard principal-agent model the empirical puzzle on the positive relationship between risk and incentives can be explained.

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004: The existing literature on the comparison of tournaments and piece rates as alternative incentive schemes has focused on the case of unlimited liability. However, in practice real workers' wealth is typically restricted....

Several empirical findings have challenged the traditional view on the trade-off between risk and incentives. By combining risk aversion and limited liability in a standard principal-agent model the empirical puzzle on the positive relationship between risk and incentives can be explained....

Several empirical findings have challenged the traditional view on the trade-off between risk and incentives. By combining risk aversion and limited liability in a standard principal-agent model the empirical puzzle ont hepositive relationship between risk and incentives can be explained....

A standard tournament contract specifies only tournament prizes. If agents' performance is measured on a cardinal scale, the principal can complement the tournament contract by a gap which defines the minimum distance by which the best performing agent must beat the second best to receive the...

The existing delegation literature has focused on different preferences of principal and agent concerning project selection, which makes delegating authority costly for the principal. This paper shows that delegation has a cost even when the preferences of principal and agent are exogenously...

Within the context of expected utility and in a discrete loss setting, we provide a complete account of the demand for insurance by strictly-risk averse agents and risk-neutral firms when they enjoy limited liability. When exposed to a bankrupting, binary loss and under actuarially fair prices,...

We characterize optimal incentive contracts in a moral hazard framework extended in two directions. First, after effort provision, the agent is free to leave and pursue some ex-post outside option. Second, the value of this outside option is increasing in effort, and hence endogenous. Optimal...

Riordan and Sappington (JET, 1988) show that in an agency relationship in which the agent's type is correlated with a public ex post signal, the principal may attain first best (full surplus extraction and efficient output levels) if the agent is faced with a lottery such that each type is...