The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to overinvest into physical assets. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed to explain this stylized fact, most of them focussing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows that...

We analyze how agents’ present bias affects optimal contracting in an infinite-horizon employment setting. The principal maximizes profits by offering a menu of contracts to naive agents: a virtual contract - which agents plan to choose in the future - and a real contract which they end up...

We analyze how agents' present bias affects optimal contracting in an infinite-horizon employment setting. The principal maximizes profits by offering a menu of contracts to naive agents: a virtual contract - which agents plan to choose in the future - and a real contract which they end up...

The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to overinvest into physical assets. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed to explain this stylized fact, most of them focussing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows that...

Despite the prevalence of non-routine analytical team tasks in modern economies, little is known about how incentives influence performance in these tasks. In a field experiment with more than 3000 participants, we document a positive effect of bonus incentives on the probability of completion...

Tournaments are often used to improve performance in innovation contexts. Tournaments provide monetary incentives but also render teams' identity and social-image concerns salient. We study the effects of tournaments on team performance in a non-routine task and identify the importance of these...

Companies increasingly shift from hierarchical to team-based organizational structures. Scholars and practitioners alike have emphasized the potential of leadership to foster performance in these settings. However, the causal impact of leadership is difficult to identify, as in agile and...

Employment protection harms early-career employees without benefitting them in later career stages (Leonardi and Pica, 2013). We demonstrate that this pattern can result from employers exploiting na¨ıve present-biased employees. Employers offer a dynamic contract with low early-career wages,...

Despite the prevalence of non-routine analytical team tasks in modern economies, little is understood regarding how incentives influence performance in these tasks. In a series of field experiments involving more than 5,000 participants, we investigate how incentives alter behavior in teams...

Tournaments are often used to improve performance in innovation contexts. Tournaments provide monetary incentives but also render teams' identity and image concerns salient. We study the effects of tournaments on team performance in a non-routine task and identify the importance of these...