We consider the problem of an employer who has to choose whether to reemploy agents with a positive track record or agents who were unsuccessful. While previously successful managers are likely to be of high ability, they have also accumulated wealth and will be harder to motivate in the future....

When an agent is offered performance related pay, the incentive effect is not only determined by the shape of the incentive contract, but also by the probability of contract enforcement. We show that weaker enforcement may reduce the agent's effort, but lead to higher-powered incentive...

We develop a model of strategic contractual incompleteness that identifies conditions under which principals might omit even costlessly verifiable terms. We then use experiments to test comparative statics predictions of the model. While it is well known that verifiability imperfections can...

We study optimal incentives in a principal-agent problem in which the agent's outside option is determined endogenously in a competitive labor market. In equilibrium, strong performance increases the agent's market value. When this value becomes sufficiently high, the threat of the agent's...

This paper models two key roles of subjective performance evaluations: their incentive role and their feedback role. The paper shows that the feedback role makes subjective pay feasible even without repeated interaction, as long as there exists some verifiable measure of performance. It also...

We use experiments to test comparative statics predictions of canonical tournament theory. Both the roles of principal and agent are populated by human subjects, allowing us to test predictions for both incentive responses and optimal tournament design. Consistent with theory, we observed an...

Incentives often fail in inducing economic agents to engage in a desirable activity; implementability is restricted. What restricts implementability? When does re-organization help to overcome this restriction? This paper shows that any restriction of implementability is caused by an...

En el contexto de la administración delegada de carteras de inversión, este artículo caracteriza las propiedades que el esquema de compensación debe poseer para incentivar la selección de portafolios con alto riesgo y alto retorno esperado. En particular, se proporcionan condiciones que...

We investigate the costs and benefits of managerial interventions with a team in which workers care to different degrees about output. We show that if there are complementarities in production and if the team manager has some information about team members, interventions by the manager may have...

We consider a repeated moral hazard problem, where both the principal and the wealth-constrained agent are risk-neutral. In each of two periods, the agent can exert unobservable effort, leading to success or failure. Incentives provided in the second period act as carrot and stick for the first...