Consider managers evaluating their employees’ performances. Should managers justify their subjective evaluations? Suppose a manager’s evaluation is private information. Justifying her evaluation is costly but limits the principal’s scope for distorting her evaluation of the employee. I...

This paper examines how employees trade off planned activities versus unplanned innovation, and how firms can choose incentives to affect these choices. It develops a multi-task model where employees makes choices between their assigned standard tasks, for which the firm has a performance...

I analyze the use of alternative performance measures using an agency model that incorporates both formal and informal agreements. I show that under the proper combination of verifiable and unverifiable performance measures, the two types of contract complement each other regardless of the...

We analyze optimal contracts in a hierarchy consisting of a principal, a supervisor and an agent. The supervisor is either neutral or altruistic towards the agent, but his preferences are private information. In a model with two supervisor types, we find that the optimal contract may be very...

This paper examines the incentive provision when the agent can respond to risk by exerting effort to collect information about the underlying state and making corresponding decisions. Such effort is shown to be more valuable in a riskier environment and incentives can increase with...

Policy advocates often push for market-like performance incentives for publicly provided services such as in education or healthcare (as with Medicare in the U.S.). The evidence supporting output-based, performance incentives for such jobs is mixed at best. One possible explanation is that the...

This paper examines multi-period compensation contracts when retirement is anticipated. Short-term contracts in long-term employment relationships are equivalent to a long-term renegotiation-proof contract. The dynamic of incentive rates is determined by (i) how and in which periods managerial...

We analyze the effects of lower bounds on wages on optimal job design within firms. In our model, two tasks affect firm value and an imperfect performance measure. Due to cost advantages of specialization, assigning the tasks to different agents is efficient. Yet a sufficiently large wage floor...

Using a formal principal-agent model, I investigate the relation between monetary gift-exchange and incentive pay, while allowing for worker heterogeneity. I assume that some agents care more for their principal when they are convinced that the principal cares for them. Principals can signal...