The article examines the optimal choice of monitoring intensity when workers face external incentives (incentives that are not provided by the firm), such as tips, satisfaction from working well, or the desire to build reputation in order to be more attractive to other employers. Increase in...

I study the effect of workers' motivation on the firm's choice of how much autonomy employees should be given. The main hypothesis of the paper is that employers give autonomy to workers who are already especially motivated. The empirical work is based on data from Wave 1 of the Health and...

According to empirical evidence, extrinsic incentives often crowd out intrinsic motivation, thus reducing the effort choices of workers. This article presents a simple model illustrating how the introduction of monetary incentives causes a discontinuous reduction in worker effort as well as a...

Considering two potential sources of income (public grants and ticket revenues),we have defined a theoretical model where the public agency is the principal and the manager of the museum is the agent. This model allows us to design the optimal contract between both sides and thus to establish...

The article discusses the possible cost savings of contracting out refuse collection in the Netherlands. According to foreign econometric studies, contracting out refuse collection leads to cost savings of approximately 20%. Our findings indicate that similar cost savings apply to the...

We study Nash equilibria of joint production games under a mixed output sharing rule in which part of the output (the mixing parameter) is shared in proportion to inputs and the rest according to exogenously determined shares. This rule includes proportional sharing and equal sharing as special...

Conventional wisdom tells us that with no market failure and local non- satiation of preferences, the core is at least as large as the collection of competitive equilibrium allocations. We confirm this for a standard model featuring land. Next we consider the public land ownership version of the...

Elbert Dijkgraaf defended his PhD-thesis 'Regulating the Dutch Waste Market' at 5 november 2004. This thesis analyses whether the risen costs of waste collection and treatment can be diminished by changing policy instruments. The thesis shows that user fees are very effective in reducing the...

Endogenous order of moves in quantity choice is analyzed in a mixed oligopoly with one public firm, n domestic private firms and m foreign private firms. We consider the observable delay game of Hamilton and Slutsky (1990) in the context of a quantity setting mixed oligopoly where firms first...

Though widespread, the practice of public subsidies for cultural activity lacks a rigorous and consistent economic rationale. We analyze a canonical market structure that characterizes much cultural activity: the competition of mass-produced goods with heterogeneous non- standardized goods that...