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...

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to...

In Bartling, Fehr and Schmidt (2012) we show theoretically and experimentally that it is optimal to grant discretion to workers if (i) discretion increases productivity, (ii) workers can be screened by past performance, (iii) some workers reciprocate high wages with high effort and (iv)...

Partnerships are the prevalent organizational form in many industries. Most partnerships share profits equally among the partners. Following Kandel and Lazear (1992) it is often argued that peer pressure mitigates the arising free-rider problem. This line of reasoning takes the equal sharing...

While most market transactions are subject to strong incentives, transactions within Firms are often not incentivized. We offer an explanation for this observation based on envy among agents in an otherwise standard moral hazard model with multiple agents. Envious agents suffer if other agents...

There is a general presumption that social preferences can be ignored if markets are competitive. Market experiments (Smith 1962) and recent theoretical results (Dufwenberg et al. 2008) suggest that competition forces people to behave as if they were purely self-interested. We qualify this view....

Many high technology goods are based on standards that require access to several patents that are owned by different IP holders. We investigate the royalties chosen by IP holders under different market structures. Vertical integration of an IP holder and a downstream producer solves the double...

Many high technology goods are based on standards that require several essential patents owned by different IP holders. This gives rise to a complements and a double mark-up problem. We compare the welfare effects of two different business strategies dealing with these problems. Vertical...

Technological standards give rise to a complements problem that affects pricing and innovation incentives of technology producers. In this paper I discuss how patent pools can be used to solve these problems and what incentives patent holders have to form a patent pool. I offer some suggestions...