A spouse who invests in relationship specific human capital enlarges the size of a couple’s total surplus. Such investments typically also weaken the outside opportunities of the specializing spouse and thereby her bargaining position. Realizing this, underinvestment in relationship specific...

Theory predicts that default breach remedies are immaterial whenever contracting costs are negligible. Some experimental studies, however, suggest that in practice default rules do matter, as they may affect parties' preferences over contract terms. This paper presents results from an experiment...

A vast body of empirical studies lends support to the incentive effects of rank-order tournaments. Evidence comes from experiments in laboratories and non-experimental studies exploiting sports or firm data. Selection of competitors across tournaments may bias these non-experimental studies,...

Existing field evidence on rank-order tournaments typically does not allow disentangling incentive and sorting effects. We conduct a field experiment illustrating the confounding effect. Students in an introductory microeconomics course selected themselves into tournaments with low, medium, or...

Incentive instruments like asset ownership and performance pay often have to strike a balance between the productive incentives and the rent-seeking incentives they provide. Standard theory predicts that these instruments become less attractive when the effectiveness of rent-seeking activities...