Awards are widely used as incentives in organizations. This paper situates awards in the broader incentives landscape and shows how the motivational value of awards can be understood with a parsimonious theoretical framework that considers three sources of value: the tangible component of an...

In a labor market with moral hazard, adverse selection, and overconfident workers, I compare the equilibrium contracts and efficiency under perfect competition and monopsony. In both market structures, screening workers according to their productivity-type requires the firm(s) to distort the...

The dopamine reward prediction error signal is known to be subjective but has so far only been related to explicit external stimuli and rewards. However, personal choices are based on private internal values of the rewards at stake. Without indications of the private internal value of an agent...

Asymmetric information about product quality can create incentives for a privately informed manufacturer to sell to uninformed consumers through a retailer and to maintain secrecy of upstream pricing. By delegating retail price setting to an intermediary the manufacturer can hide information...