Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These "high-performance work systems" are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show...

This paper considers incentives for information acquisition ahead of conflicts. First, we characterize the (unique) equilibrium of the all-pay auction between two players with one-sided asymmetric information where one player has private information about his valuation. Then, we use ou rresults...