This paper reports the results from a laboratory experiment which investigates the structure of contracts that emerge in overlapping-generation firms where future ownership is a perquisite of employment. Workers in the young generation are offered employment contracts designed by the firms'...

A normative conflict arises when there exist multiple plausible norms of behavior. In such cases, norm enforcement can lead to a sequence of mutual retaliatory sanctions, which we refer to as a feud. We investigate the hypothesis that normative conflict enhances the likelihood of a feud in a...

This paper investigates the relationship between relative earnings and giving in a twostage, real-effort experiment. In the first stage, four players compete in a tournament that determines their earnings. In the second stage, they decide whether they wish to transfer part of their earnings to...

Institutions that form to reduce moral hazard often eliminate discretion and pool the actions of heterogeneous agents. An unintended consequence of this pooling is that agents' types cannot be determined by their actions. While in the short run such mechanisms may be optimal, in the long run...

Most countries prohibit the export of certain antiquities. This practice often leads to illegal excavation and looting for the black market, which damages the items and compromises the archaeological record. We consider the prospect of long-term antiquity leases and sales contracts with a...

Authority and power permeate political, social, and economic life but there is limited empirical knowledge about the motivational origins and consequences of authority. We experimentally study the motivation and incentive effects of authority in an authority-delegation game. Individuals exhibit...

Compared with other types of policy, regulation is very persistent, even when inefficient. We propose an explanation for regulatory persistence based on regulatory fog,the phenomenon by which regulation obscures information about the eects of deregulation. We construct a dynamic model of...