We revisit job design with sequential tasks and outcome externalities from a different perspective, extending Schmitz (2013a). When two sequential tasks need to be performed by wealth-constrained agents, the principal can hire only one agent or two different agents. When there exists an outcome...

We examine the effect of single-sex schooling on students’ competitiveness by studying middle school students in Seoul who were randomly assigned to either single-sex or coeducational schools within their school districts. Contrary to popular belief and existing studies, our results suggest...

We investigate the relationship between tournament prices and effort choices in the presence of favoritism. High tournament prizes can decrease agents’ effort supply when the choice of the winner is not perfectly objective but affected to some extent by personal preferences of an evaluator.

We investigate under which circumstances bonus payments for managers are accepted as fair, asking workers to judge several hypothetical scenarios. We find that perceptions vary widely with the characteristics of the situation, as well as with the workers’ general attitudes.

Evidence from US data suggests that increases in parental education significantly steepen the slope of male experience–earnings profiles during early career years, other things equal.

We provide a simple asymmetric information model showing that, in contrast to portfolio diversification arguments, there is a natural complementarity between executive options and stock ownership. Moreover, managers can be made worse off by being granted more executive options.

Using panel data, we demonstrate a 50% increase in research productivity following a dramatic increase in the piece rate paid for articles by a major Chinese University. The increased productivity comes exclusively from those who were already research active.

We add social norms into Laffont’s mechanism designed for environmental risk. We find with endogenous social norms and asymmetric information about personal norms, the optimal contract induces more (less) effort from the “green” (“brown”) firm.

Hyperbolic discounting with naiveté is widely believed to provide a better explanation than exponential discounting of why people borrow so much and why they wait so long to save for retirement. We reach a different set of conclusions. We show that if financial planning is enriched to include...

We conduct experiments with adolescent participants on repeated fixed play in three different zero-sum games which have mixed strategy minimax solutions. Further, we collect subject information on cognitive abilities and participation rates in competitive activities. We find the adolescents’...