Traditionally, researchers have had difficulty testing the relationship between the degree of risk or uncertainty in workers' environments and incentive pay. The authors employ Prendergast's (2002) theory that incorporates the delegation of worker authority into the principal-agent model to...

To address agents' moral hazard over effort, incentive contracts impose risk on the agents. As performance measures become noisier, the conventional agency analysis predicts that principals will reduce the incentive weights assigned to such measures. However, prior empirical results (Prendergast...

A performance standard's horizon is the time given to achieve the standard. Horizons vary considerably in practice, and the goal-setting literature provides mixed evidence on whether short or long horizons are more effective at eliciting effort from workers. I predict and find that uncertainty...

A main prediction of agency theory is the well known risk-incentive trade-off. Incentive contracts should be found in environments with little uncertainty and for agents with low degrees of risk aversion. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the first trade-off. Due to lack of...

Compensation schemes have been blamed for encouraging excess risk-taking on the part of managers within the financial system and real economy. In general, compensation cannot decrease below the base salary, while gains from bonuses can be limitless. The potential link between compensation and...

One of the standard predictions of the agency theory is that more incentives can be given to agents with lower risk aversion. In this paper, we show that this relationship may be absent or reversed when the technology is endogenous and projects with a higher efficiency are also riskier. Using a...

This paper seeks to characterize incentive compensation in a static principal-agent moral hazard setting in which both the principal and the agent are prudent (or downside risk averse). We show that optimal incentive pay should then be `approximately concave' in performance, the approximation...

This paper investigates the optimal design of incentives when agents distort probabilities. We show that the type of probability distortion displayed by the agent and its degree determine whether an incentivecompatible contract can be implemented, the strength of the incentives included in the...

Policy advocates often push for market-like performance incentives for publicly provided services such as in education or healthcare (as with Medicare in the U.S.). The evidence supporting output-based, performance incentives for such jobs is mixed at best. One possible explanation is that the...

This study analyzed the principal-agent problem, in which the agent performs risk management tasks, and considered the cost minimization problem of the principal, the objective of which is to design the cheapest contract inducing a target effort. Our results confirm that a one-step bonus...