This paper provides a theoretical model for the coattail effect, where a popular candidate for one branch of government attracts votes to candidates from the same political party for other branches of government. I assume a political agency framework with moral hazard in order to analyze the...

We study three fundamental components of financial agency settings: Perception and communication of investment profiles, the interaction of agents’ and clients’ preferences, and the role of (non-)monetary incentives. The perception of investment profile terminology is very heterogeneous,...

We document outcome bias in situations where an agent makes risky financial decisions for a principal. In three experiments, we show that the principal’s evaluations and financial rewards for the agent are strongly affected by the random outcome of the risky investment. This happens despite...

How do different characteristics of pay-for-performance schemes affect fairness perceptions? In two studies, we systematically consider three major classes of incentive schemes: continuous piece rate incentives, discrete bonus schemes, and tournament incentives. We find that pay inequality has a...

We modify the principal-agent model with moral hazard by assuming that the agent is expectation-based loss averse according to Köszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The optimal contract is a binary payment scheme even for a rich performance measure, where standard preferences predict a fully...