We show that individuals' desire to protect their self-esteem against ego-threatening feedback can mitigate moral hazard in environments with purely subjective performance evaluations. In line with evidence from social psychology we assume that agents' react aggressively to evaluations by the...

A seller of a divisible good faces several identical buyers. The quality of the good may be low or high, and is the seller's private information. The seller has strictly convex preferences that satisfy a single-crossing property. Buyers compete by posting menus of nonexclusive contracts, so that...

Consider a seller of a divisible good, facing several identical buyers. The quality of the good may be low or high, and is the seller's private information. The seller has strictly convex preferences that satisfy a single-crossing property. Buyers compete by posting arbitrary menus of contracts....

We conduct a laboratory experiment with agents working on and principals benefitting from a real effort task in which the agents' performance can only be evaluated subjectively. Principals give subjective performance feedback to agents and agents have an opportunity to sanction principals. In...

s demonstrated in a recent laboratory experiment [see Sebald and Walzl (2014)], individuals tend to sanction others who subjectively evaluate their performance when-ever this assessment falls short of the individuals' self-evaluation. Interestingly, this is the case even if the individuals'...

We study a nonexclusive insurance market with adverse selection in which insurers compete through simple contract offers. Multiple contracting endogenously emerges in equilibrium. Different layers of coverage are priced fairly according to the types of insurees who purchase them, giving rise to...

We study a nonexclusive insurance market with adverse selection in which insurers compete through simple contract offers. Multiple contracting endogenously emerges in equilibrium. Different layers of coverage are priced fairly according to the types of insurees who purchase them, giving rise to...

Many financial markets rely on a discriminatory limit-order book to balance supply and demand. We study these markets in a static model in which uninformed market makers compete in nonlinear tariffs to trade with an informed insider, as in Glosten (1994), Biais, Martimort, and Rochet (2000), and...

A seller of a divisible good faces several identical buyers. The quality of the good may be low or high, and is the seller's private information. The seller has strictly convex preferences that satisfy a single-crossing property. Buyers compete by posting menus of nonexclusive contracts, so that...

As we have demonstrated in a recent laboratory experiment [see Sebald and Walzl (2012)], individuals tend to sanction others who subjectively evaluate their performance whenever this assessment falls short of the individual's self-evaluation even if their earnings are unaffected by the...