We use a laboratory experiment to investigate the extent to which leaders---faced with opportunistic incentives---employ monitoring to improve team production. Participants are assigned to teams, with one person appointed as the leader. The leader has the power to commit to a monitoring option,...

Recent work in experimental economics on the effectiveness of rewards and punishments for promoting cooperation mainly examines decentralized incentive systems where all group members can reward and/or punish one another. Many self-organizing groups and societies, however, concentrate the power...

In this paper, we investigate whether dynamic incentive schemes lead to a ratchet effect in a social dilemma. We test whether subjects strategically restrict their contribution levels at the beginning of a cumulative public goods game in order to avoid high obligations in the future and how this...

We study optimal direct mechanisms for a credence goods expert who can be altruistic or spiteful. The expert has private information about her distributional preferences and possibly also about her customer's needs. We introduce a method that allows the customer to offer separate contracts to...

In a multi-agent setting, individuals often compare own performance with that of their peers. These comparisons influence agents incentives and lead to a noncooperative game, even if the agents have to complete independent tasks. I show that depending on the interplay of the peer effects, agents...

We examine how a principal implements a joint forcing contract for a team of two agents, whose joint product determines the value of the principal's asset. We focus on the "agents' problem": whether to contribute to a public good when one's costly contribution is unobservable. Our experiments...

We present an explanation of the high frequency of team production and high level of peer monitoring found in Japanese firms, in terms of a simple and empirically grounded variation in individual utility functions. We argue that Japanese agents are generally characterized by a higher degree,...

Experimental studies have modeled individual funding of social projects as contributions to a threshold public good. We examine donors' behavior when they face multiple threshold public goods and the possibility of coordinating their contributions via an intermediary. Employing the experimental...

We experimentally investigate the effect of a dominated contract in team production, which punishes low output but does not reward high output. We consider three systems of implementing the dominated contract: exogenous, voting, and leadership. We find that teams choose the dominated contract in...

We conducted six treatments of a standard moral hazard experiment with hidden action. All treatments had identical Nash equilibria. However, the behavior in all treatments and periods was inconsistent with established agency theory (Nash equilibrium). In the early periods of the experiment,...