Policy-makers world-wide have proposed a new contract – the “social impact bond” (SIB) – which they claim can allay the underperformance and underfunding afflicting not-for-profit sectors, by tying the private returns of (social) investors to the success of social programs (Bolton 2010;...

Policymakers worldwide have proposed a new contract – the ‘social impact bond’ (SIB) – which they claim can allay the underperformance afflicting not-for-profits, by tying the private returns of (social) investors to the success of social programs. We investigate experimentally how SIBs...

We provide a game-theoretic model of academic organizations, focusing on the strategic interaction of prototypical overseers, administrators, and professors. By identifying key principal-agent games routinely played in colleges and universities, we begin to unpack the black box typically used to...