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...

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)...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Most economic models are based on the self-interest hypothesis that assumes that all people are exclusively motivated by their material self-interest. In recent years experimental economists have gathered overwhelming evidence that systematically refutes the self-interest hypothesis and suggests...

We show that concerns for fairness may have dramatic consequences for the optimal provision of incentives in a moral hazard context. Incentive contracts that are optimal when there are only selfish actors become inferior when some agents are concerned about fairness. Conversely, contracts that...

Der Aufsatz gibt zunächst einen kurzen Überblick über die Entwicklung des Marktes für Wagniskapital in den USA und in Deutschland. Dann wird gezeigt, mit welchen besonderen Anreiz- und Vertragsproblemen die Finanzierung von Innovationen zu kämpfen hat und welche neuen Instrumente von der...

This paper studies the relation between discrete-time and continuoustime principal-agent models. We derive the continuous-time model as a limit of discretetime models with ever shorter periods and show that optimal incentive schemes in the discrete-time models approximate the optimal incentive...