We study the problem of multiple principals who want to obtain income from a privately informed agent and design their contracts non-cooperatively. Our analysis reveals that the degree of coordination between principals has strong implications for the shapes of contracts and the amount of...

We analyze how a major negative shock to the producers of fossil fuels may lead to a shift from dirty to clean R&D along the supply chain. First, we develop a theoretical framework of directed technical change, showing that adjustment costs in R&D activity can lead fossil energy sector suppliers...

We introduce the word illustration task (WIT), a novel experimental task to quantify performance in an idea generation context. Between treatments, we vary whether or not piece-rate (PR) incentives are implemented and the degree to which these incentives are aligned with the desirable outcome....

Can standard measures of industrial policy such as R&D subsidies or financial support for machine replacement be effective tools to reverse the current pattern of increasing market power and declining business dynamism? To answer this question we explore the effects of various industrial policy...

In unavoidable traffic accidents, autonomous vehicles (AVs) face the dilemma of protecting either the passenger(s) or third parties. Recent studies show that most people prefer AVs following a utilitarian approach by minimizing total harm. At the same time, however, they would adopt an AV only...

Economic societies emerged during the late eighteenth-century. We argue that these institutions reduced the costs of accessing useful knowledge by adopting, producing, and diffusing new ideas. Combining location information for the universe of 3,300 members across active economic societies in...

The costs of low-carbon energy fell dramatically over the past decade, leading to rapid growth in its deployment. However, many challenges remain to deploy low-carbon energy at a scale necessary to meet net zero carbon emission targets. We argue that developing complementary technologies and...

The effects of performance pay in routine, easy to measure tasks are well-documented, but they are much less understood in knowledge creation. This paper studies the effects of explicit and implicit, career concerns incentives common in knowledge work in a multitasking model, and estimates their...

We provide quantitative evidence on the relationship between military spending and innovation in the 19th century. Combining innovation data from world fairs and historical military data across Europe, we show that national military spending is associated with national innovation towards war...

We study how trademarks affect reuse of creative works in the comics industry. As a creative industry, the comics industry systematically relies on copyrights. But trademark protection can also be exploited to generate income from the reuse of comic characters or to strategically exclude others...