In many economic situations several principals contract with the same agents sequentially. Asymmetric learning about agents' abilities provides the first principal with an informational advantage and has profound implications for the design of incentive contracts. We show that the principal...

Holmström's (1982/99) career concerns model has become an important workhorse for the analysis of agency issues in many fields. The underlying signal jamming argument requires players to use information in a Bayesian way which may or may not reasonably approximate real-life decision makers'...

Holmström's (1982/99) career concerns model has become an important workhorse for the analysis of agency issues in many fields. The underlying signal jamming argument requires players to use information in a Bayesian way which may or may not reasonably approximate real-life decision makers'...

Recent bargaining experiments demonstrated an impact of anonymity and incomplete information on subjects' behavior. This has rekindled the question whether "fair" behavior is inspired by regard for others or is explained by external forces. To test for the importance of external pressure we...

Labor turnover creates longer term career concerns incentives that motivate employees in addition to the short term monetary incentives provided by the current employer. We analyze how these incentives interact and derive implications for the design of incentive contracts and organizational...

We study in an online, real-effort experiment how the bracketing of non-binding goals affects performance in a work-leisure self-control problem. We externally induce the goal bracket – daily goals or a weekly goal – and within that bracket let subjects set goals for how much they want to...

We provide a tractable model of motivational goal bracketing by a present-biased individual, extending previous work to show that the main insights from models with rational goals carry over to a setting with non-rational goals. Goals motivate because they serve as reference points that make...

Promotions and cross-firm mobility provide substantial gains in earnings ﾖ a well established finding based on gross income data. Yet, what matters for incentives is how much an individual can consume or save after taxation. We show that net and gross income growth patterns may differ...

We model how people formulate and evaluate goals to overcome self-control problems. People often attempt to regulate their behavior by evaluating goal-related outcomes separately (in narrow psychological accounts) rather than jointly (in a broad account). To explain this evidence, our theory of...

Inefficient job assignments are usually explained with incomplete information about employees' abilities or contractual imperfections. We show that inefficient assignments arise even with full information about employees' types and complete contracts. Our further results provide a new...