Managers often use tournaments which motivate workers to compete for the top, compete to avoid the bottom, or both. In this paper we compare the effectiveness and efficiency of the corresponding incentive schemes. To do so, we utilize optimal contracts in a principal-agent setting, using a...

The willingness of individuals to enforce social norms can have important welfare implications. All the experimental evidence on norm enforcement so far comes from laboratory experiments and indicates that many participants are indeed willing to enforce norms, even in one-shot interactions. We...