Committees improve decisions by pooling independent information of members, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private evidence when members have conflicting preferences. We study how self-interest mediates these conflicting forces. When members' preferences differ, no...

We present a two-period model of the assignment market with uncertainty in the first period regarding productive characteristics of participants. This model is used to understand incentives toward early contracts or unraveling in labor markets for entry-level professionals. We study two...

The role of rewards for maintaining performance incentives in multistage, sequential games of survival is studied. The sequential structure is a statistical design-of-experiments for selecting and ranking contestants. It promotes survival of the fittest and saves sampling costs by early...

This paper elaborates equilibrium properties of contract labor markets when cost barriers limit labor mobility in response to demand and productivity shifts. Unemployment is sustained because the marginal value of labor is not equated across all firms; however the equilibrium contract optimally...

Many discrete life choices--where to live, what kind of job to hold, and consumption lifestyle--are stratified by income. Stratification and sorting often manifest state-dependent preferences in which the marginal utility of income (consumption) depends on the outcome of prior choices. For...

7mplicit contracts resolve the distribution of uncertainty and utilization of specific human capital between risk averse workers and less risk averse firms. Incomplete contracts are required to yield involuntary layoffs in contract markets: otherwise, contracts are efficient and pareto optimal...

This paper investigates some alternative definitions of labor for productivity and demand analysis. The paper is organized as follows: Section II considers the organization of work activities in a simple fixed coefficient technology in the presence of comparative advantage among various classes...

Many interesting elements of supply and demand are starkly observable in professional athletics. Understanding institutional arrangements, competitive balance and labor-management relations requires a basic understanding of sports labor markets and the struggle for control of those markets...

Rapidly growing costs of elementary and secondary education are studied in the context of the rising value of women's time. The three-fold increase in direct costs of education per student in the past three decades was caused by increasing demand and utilization of teacher and staff inputs,...

This paper exposits the modern theory of equalizing differences,viewed as optimal assignments of workers to jobs. The basic ideas are first illustrated in a simple model with binary choices of work attributes.Multinominal choices are briefly considered after that. Empirical implications are...