This paper studies the interplay between deadlines and cognitive limitations. We analyze an agent's decision to complete a one-off task under a deadline. Postponing the task can be beneficial for the agent; missing the deadline, however, leads to a drop in the agent's rewards. If the agent...

We consider a principal-agent model with moral hazard where the agent’s knowledge about the performance measure is ambiguous and he is averse towards ambiguity. We show that the principal may optimally provide no incentives or contract only on a subset of all informative performance measures....

We consider an economic model of child development with multiple stages. Due to incomplete information, parents are not able to tailor their investments to their child’s type when the child is young. We show that incomplete information weakens the importance of early investments in children...

A large share of students in higher education graduates with delay or fails to obtain a degree at all. In our field experiment, students can sign a non-binding agreement and self-commit to staying on track for graduation. We provide first evidence that soft commitment devices can enhance...

We show that a steeply increasing workload before a deadline is compatible with time-consistent preferences. The key departure from the literature is that we consider a stochastic environment where success of effort is not guaranteed

We modify the principal-agent model with moral hazard by assuming that the agent is expectation-based loss averse according to Köszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The optimal contract is a binary payment scheme even for a rich performance measure, where standard preferences predict a fully...

We explore how the threat of entry influences the innovation activity of an incumbent. We show that the incumbent's investment is hump-shaped in the entry threat. When the entry threat is small and increases, the incumbent invests more to deter entry, or to make it unlikely. This is due to the...

We consider a brand manufacturer who can offer, next to its high-quality product, also a decoy good and faces competition by a competitive fringe that produces low quality. We show that the brand manufacturer optimally provides a decoy good to boost the demand for its main product if consumers'...