Many experiments indicate that most individuals are not purely motivated by material self interest, but also care about the well being of others. In this paper we examine tournaments among inequity averse agents, who dislike disadvantageous inequity (envy) and advantageous inequity (compassion)....

Numerous laboratory experiments show that workers reciprocate to high wages with high effort, when there is perfect information on the surplus created. Recent field experiments, however, suggest that trust and reciprocity may be lower or absent when the information is incomplete. We report a...

We build a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. The presence of rewards or punishments creates doubt as to the true motive for which good deeds are performed, and this 'overjustification...

The British Industrial Revolution triggered a reversal in the social order whereby the landed elite was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group. Many observers have linked this transformation to the contrast in values between a...

When two or more agents compete for a bonus and the agents' productivity in each of several possible occurrences depends stochastically on (constant) effort, the number of times that are checked to assign the bonus affects the level of un-certainty in the selection process. Uncertainty, in turn,...

We study the impact of tax policy on wage negotiations, workers' effort, employment, output and welfare when workers' effort is only imperfectly observable. We show that the different wage-setting motives - rent sharing and effort incentives - reinforce the effects of partial tax policy measures...

We study the relation between formal incentives and social exchange in organizations where employees work for several managers and reciprocate a manager's attention with higher effort. To this end we develop a common agency model with two-sided moral hazard. We show that when effort is...

We provide evidence on how two important types of institutions - dismissal barriers, and bonus pay - affect contract enforcement behavior in a market with incomplete contracts and repeated interactions. Dismissal barriers are shown to have a strong negative impact on worker performance, and...

This paper analyzes the implications of effective taxation of labor for profits and, hence, the location decision of a multinational enterprise. We set up a stylized partial equilibrium model and, presuming that worker effort is a function of net wages, assume that a higher employee-borne tax...

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...