A substantial body of research investigates the design of incentives in firms, yet less is known about incentives in organizations that hire individuals to perform tasks with positive social spillovers. We conduct a field experiment in which agents hired by a public health organization are...

We study a contracting model with unforeseen contingencies in which the court is an active player. Ex-ante, the contracting parties cannot include the risky unforeseen contingencies in the contract they draw up. Ex-post the court observes whether an unforeseen contingency occurred, and decides...

This paper studies the effect of ownership structure on workers' incentives for investing in firm-specific human capital. Particularly, we analyse such incentivers and monitoring under employee ownership and capitalist ownership. In our model, the employee-owned firm is a firm bought by its...

We study the impact of incentive pay, local development objectives and governmentconstraints on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contractingmodel of technology licensing offices, using new survey information together with paneldata on U.S. universities for 1995-99....

Organizations often use awards to incentivize performance. We design a field experiment to unbundle the mechanisms through which awards may affect behavior: by facilitating social comparison and by conferring recognition and visibility. In a nationwide health worker training program in Zambia,...

This paper studies the role of intrinsic motivation, reputation and reciprocity in driving open source software innovation. We exploit the observed pattern of contributions - the 'revealed preference' of developers - to infer the underlying incentives. Using detailed information on code...

Organizations often use awards to incentivize performance. We design a field experiment to unbundle the mechanisms through which awards may affect behavior: by facilitating social comparison and by conferring recognition and visibility. In a nationwide health worker training program in Zambia,...

We show that economic incentives affect the commercial value of inventions generated in universities. Using data for 102 U.S. universities during the period 1991-1999, we find that universities which give higher royalty shares to academic scientists generate higher license income, controlling...