Showing 1 - 10 of 67
We analyze the effects of wage floors on optimal job design in a moral-hazard model with asymmetric tasks and imperfect aggregate performance measurement. Due to cost advantages of specialization, assigning the tasks to different agents is efficient. A sufficiently high wage floor, however,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010339385
We analyze optimal labor contracts when the worker is inequity averse towards the employer. Welfare is maximized for an equal sharing rule of surplus between the worker and the firm. That is, profit sharing is optimal even if effort is contractible. If the firm can make a take-it-or leave-it...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010341624
Incentives often distort behavior: they induce agents to exert effort but this effort is not employed optimally. This paper proposes a theory of incentive design allowing for such distorted behavior. At the heart of the theory is a trade-off between getting the agent to exert effort and ensuring...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010344596
We study an infinitely repeated principal-agent relationship with on-the-job search. On-the-job search is modeled as a dimension of the agent's effort vector that has no effect on output, but raises his future outside option. The agent's incentives to search are increasing in the degree to which...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010338954
We consider a two-stage principal-agent model with limited liability in which a CEO is employed as agent to gather information about suitable merger targets and to manage the merged corporation in case of an acquisition. Our results show that the CEO systematically recommends targets with low...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010340013
With the help of lab experiments we study the impact of discharging insolvent debtors of their residual debt. We investigate the impact of different participation rules and the impact of different types of lenders. We find that higher participation rates encourage risk taking behaviour of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010341120
We propose a theory of ex post inefficient renegotiation that is based on loss aversion. When two parties write a long-term contract that has to be renegotiated after the realization of the state of the world, they take the initial contract as a reference point to which they compare gains and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010342285
We propose a theory of inefficient renegotiation that is based on loss aversion. When two parties write a long-term contract that has to be renegoti- ated after the realization of the state of the world, they take the initial contract as a reference point to which they compare gains and losses...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010487344
We study a sequential screening problem where the agent produces an object consisting of multiple items and has a multidimensional type that he learns over time. Depending on the strength of complementarity/substitutability of the items, the optimal allocation features a different pattern of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010491117
In a globalized economy, firms move production to other countries without turning a hair. A local policy maker who seeks to avert relocation faces a dynamic problem - incentivizing the firm to remain in its home country today does not guarantee that the firm also stays in the future. We...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010482509