Incentive schemes affect performance and priorities of agents but, in reality, they can be complicated even for simple tasks. We analyze the effects of the salience of incentives in a team production setting where the principal has an interest in quantity and quality of output. We use data from...

This paper provides new evidence on the negative effect of natural catastrophes on economic development. The findings indicate that private insurance markets accommodate the negative effects of natural catastrophes in developed countries, whereas they do not seem to be effective in developing...

Many labor relations are characterized by the possibility of repeated interaction without long term contracts and with discretionary pay components. We implement such a structure in the lab by allowing workers and firms to interact repeatedly for many periods absent a pre-announced final period....

Filing income tax returns or insurance claims often requires that individuals comply with complex rules to meet their obligations. We present evidence from a laboratory tax experiment suggesting that the effects of complexity on compliance are intrinsically linked to distributive fairness. We...

We conduct a field experiment where we vary both the presence of a gift-exchange wage and the effect of the worker's effort on the manager's payoff. Results indicate a strong complementarity between the initial wage-gift and the agent's ability to "repay the gift". We control for differences in...

Filing income tax returns or insurance claims often requires that individuals comply with complex rules to meet their obligations. We present evidence from a laboratory tax experiment suggesting that the effects of complexity on compliance are intrinsically linked to distributive fairness. We...

Empirically, compensation systems generate substantial effort despite weak monetary incentives. We consider reciprocal motivations as a source of incentives. We solve for the optimal contract in the basic principal-agent problem and show that reciprocal motivations and explicit performance-based...

The issue of how to remunerate executives has been hotly debated, at least as far back as Berle and Means (1932) who first stressed the separation of ownership and control and the emergence of a powerful class of professional managers. But for a long time the debate had been largely restricted...

An important aspect in determining the effectiveness of gift exchange relations in labor markets is the ability of the worker to "repay the gift" to the employer. To test this hypothesis, we conduct a real effort laboratory experiment where we vary the wage and the effect of the worker's effort...