We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how locus of control operates through people's preferences and beliefs to influence their decisions. Using the principal-agent setting of the delegation game, we test four key channels that conceptually link locus of control to decision-making: (i)...

The project of bolstering the administrative state’s perceived legitimacy is central to administrative law. To enhance agencies’ legitimacy with the public, generations of judges and scholars have variously called for changes designed to insulate technocrats from political influence, involve...

Outsourcing public services to private providers is heralded for increasing government efficiency. Yet, outsourcing also offers opportunities to circumvent employment regulations in the public sector. The praised flexibility that private contractors have to hire employees can also be used to...

In a multi-agent setting, we study the optimal design of the monitoring and compensation scheme to uniquely implement work when a limited number of contractible messages are available. When only two messages can be used, the optimal incentive contract features two sub-teams competing for a...

In this experimental study, we compare the effects of a compensation scheme based on Relative Performance Evaluation (RPE) and a compensation scheme based on Absolute Performance Evaluation (APE) on decision-making in a market game. To this end, we conduct an online experiment using the strategy...

How robust are socioeconomic agent-based models with respect to the details of the agents' decision rule? We tackle this question by considering an occupation model in the spirit of the Sakoda-Schelling model, historically introduced to shed light on segregation dynamics among human groups. For...

After the stunning decline in the FTC staff’s views of senior leadership in 2021—nearly the largest decline of any federal agency in a decade—satisfaction with senior leadership fell again in 2022, while views of FTC supervisory leadership once again improved. The agency appears to be in...

We study a sequential screening problem in which the information structure is characterized by neither first-order stochastic dominance (FOSD) nor mean-preserving spread (MPS). Specifically, we refer to a procurement contract with privately known mean and spread of cost distribution. The...

Using field and laboratory experiments, we demonstrate that the complexity of incentive schemes and worker bounded rationality can affect effort provision, by shrouding attributes of the incentives. In our setting, complexity leads workers to over-provide effort relative to a fully rational...

Values are in dialectic co-construction. Values are relational, that is, they only emerge when two or more agential forces engage with one another to bring forth reality. As an emergent property of the encounter between forces, social agency, as a specific form of agency or capacity to act, is...