Economists typically predict that people are inherently selfish; however, experimental evidence suggests that this is often not the case. In particular, delegating a choice (such as a wage) to the performing party may imbue this party with a sense of responsibility, leading to improved outcomes...

Work and trade relationships are often governed by relational contracts, in which incentives for cooperative action today stem from the prospective future benefits of the relationship. In this paper, we study how reductions in clarity about the financial consequences of actions, induced by...

Work and trade relationships are often governed by relational contracts, in which incentives for cooperative action today stem from the prospective future benefits of the relationship. In this paper, we study how reductions in clarity about the financial consequences of actions, induced by...

Two aspects of social context are central to the finance industry. First, financial professionals usually make investment decisions on behalf of third parties. Second, social competition, in the form of performance rankings, is pervasive. Therefore, we investigate professionals' risk-taking...

I develop a principal-agent model where a profit-maximizing principal employs two agents to undertake a project. The employees differ in terms of their intrinsic motivation towards the project and this is their private information. I analyze the impact of individual and team incentives on the...

We generalize the disutility of effort function in the linear-Constant Absolute Risk Aversion (CARA) puremoral hazardmodel.We assume that agents are heterogeneous in ability. Each agent's ability is observable and treated as a parameter that indexes the disutility of effort associated with the...

This paper studies how pay transparency affects organizations that reward employees based on their efforts (i.e., using “subjective performance evaluation”). First, we show that transparency triggers social comparisons that require the organization to pay its employees an “envy premium”....