This paper analyzes data from a tournament, namely the National Hockey League regular scheduled season of games, which provides incentives to increase effort in order to reach the playoffs and incentives to decrease effort once a team has been eliminated from playoff considerations because of...

I compare group to individual performance pay when workers are envious and performance is non-verifiable. Avoiding payoff inequity, the group bonus contract is superior as long as the firm faces no credibility problem. The individual bonus contract may, however, become superior albeit...

We analyze the effects of wage floors on optimal job design in a moral-hazard model with asymmetric tasks and imperfect aggregate performance measurement. Due to cost advantages of specialization, assigning the tasks to different agents is efficient. A sufficiently high wage floor, however,...

To test and replicate the superstar effect reported by Brown (2011) we empirically study contests where a single entrant has an endogenously higher probability of winning. Unlike the previous literature, we test for the presence of the superstar effect in several different contexts. Ultimately,...

We characterize optimal incentive contracts in a moral hazard framework extended in two directions. First, after effort provision, the agent is free to leave and pursue some ex-post outside option. Second, the value of this outside option is increasing in effort, and hence endogenous. Optimal...

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-veriable firm value and affect an imperfect performance measure. The tasks can be assigned to either one or two agents. In the absence...

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". This...