Firms often motivate their workers with implicit incentive contracts. Since these contracts are sustained through the threat of future retaliations by the workers, their sustenance hinges on the worker's observability of the game's history. When a long-lived firm hires a sequence of short-lived...

What is the motivational effect of imposing a minimum effort requirement? Agents may no longer exert voluntary effort but merely meet the requirement. Here, we examine how such hidden costs of control change when control is considered legitimate. We study a principal-agent model where control...

Costly competitions between economic agents are modeled as contests. Researchers use laboratory experiments to study contests and test comparative static predictions of contest theory. Commonly, researchers find that participants' efforts are significantly higher than predicted by the standard...

Group contests are ubiquitous. Some examples include warfare between countries, competition between political parties, team-incentives within firms, group sports, and rent-seeking. In order to succeed, members of the same group have incentives to cooperate with each other by expending individual...

Economic partners – like masters and apprentices – produce benefits for each other. Yet, they are often subject to contracting limitations that restrict their actions, and thus the benefits they produce and receive. We characterize the relationship between (contracting) limitations and...

This paper studies a class of games, quot;All-Pay Contestsquot;, which captures general asymmetries and sunk investments inherent in scenarios such as lobbying, competition for market power, labor-market tournaments, and Ramp;D races. Players compete for one of several identical prizes by...

This paper investigates equilibrium behavior in a class of games that models asymmetric competitions with unconditional and conditional investments. Such competitions include lobbying settings, labor-market tournaments, and Ramp;D races, among others. I provide an algorithm that constructs the...

Within a laboratory experiment we investigate a principal-agent game in which agents may, first, self-select into a group task (GT) or an individual task (IT) and, second, choose work effort. In their choices of task and effort the agents have to consider pay contracts for both tasks as offered...

We show experimentally that a principal's distrust in the voluntary performance of an agent has a negative impact on the agent's motivation to perform well. Before the agent chooses his performance, the principal in our experiment decides whether he wants to restrict the agents' choice set by...

We propose a dual selves model to integrate affective responses and belief-dependent emotions into game theory. We apply our model to team production and model a worker as being composed of a rational self, who chooses effort, and an emotional self, who expresses esteem. Similar to psychological...