Dismissal rules, i.e. legally enforced long term contracts, have beem defended against criticism for, among other things, providing efficient incentives to invest in relationship specific skills. However, in many situations efficient investment can also be attained by spot contracts. We...

Motivated by the Kyle-Back model of 'insider trading', we consider certain classes of linear transformations of two independent Brownian motions and study their canonical decomposition as semimartingales in their own filtration. In particular we characterize those transformations which generate...

On a homogeneous oligopoly market informed sellers are fully aware of market demand whereas uninformed sellers only know the distribution. We first derive the market results when sellers are risk averse, similarly to Ponssard (1979) who assumed risk neutrality throughout. With the help of these...

Financial constraints are an important impediment to the growth of small businesses. We study theoretically and empirically how the financial constraints of agents affect their decisions to exert effort, and, hence the organizational decisions and growth of principals, in the context of...

This paper reports on an experiment of corruption that was conducted in two treatments: one with the possibility of detection and one without. It turns out that monitoring reduces corruption through deterrence; at the same time, it destroys the intrinsic motivation for honesty. Thus the net effect...

Many environmental-policy problems are characterized by complexity and uncertainty. Government's choice concerning these policies commonly relies on information provided by a bureaucracy. Environmental bureaucrats often have a political motivation of their own, so they might be tempted to...

In this experimental study we examine the impact of self-fulfilling prophecies on financial ratings. According to theoretical models like Kuhner (2001), rating agencies are more likely to reveal their private information if their rating can not become self-fulfilling from an ex-post point of...

This paper shows that portfolio constraints have important implications for management compensation and performance evaluation. In particular, in the presence of portfolio constraints, allowing for benchmarking can be bene…cial. Benchmark design arises as an alternative effort inducement...

We analyze the effects of lower bounds on wages, e.g., minimum wages or liability limits, on job design within firms. In our model, two tasks contribute to non-verifiable firm value and affect an imperfect performance measure. The tasks can be assigned to either one or two agents. In the absence...

The lemons model assumes that owners of used cars have an informational advantage over potential buyers with respect to the quality of their vehicles. Owners of bad cars will try to sell them to unsuspecting buyers while owners of good cars will hold on to theirs. Consequently, the quality of...