Experimental economics is used to compare tournaments (T) and fixed performance contracts (F) when agents have heterogeneous costs. Our primary findings were: (1) There is no statistical difference in average pooled effort (effort by high ability and low ability subjects are pooled together to...

Two well-known hypotheses from the literature on tournaments are that (1) tournaments can filter out common shocks thereby reducing agents’ risk exposure; and (2) disincentive effects can arise when a tournament scheme is administered on a group of mixed ability agents. While handicapping and/or...

Implementation arrangements for Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation can be seen as contracts that could address some of the inherent problems with forest carbon credits that often lead to high transaction costs -- measuring, monitoring, and verification....

The success of reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation depends on the design of an effective financial mechanism that provides landholders sufficient incentives to participate and provide additional and permanent carbon offsets. This paper proposes self-enforcing...

Experimental economics is used to compare tournaments (T) and fixed performance contracts (F) when agents have heterogeneous costs. Results suggest that: (1) There is no difference in average pooled effort across contracts, (2) high ability agents exert higher effort than low ability agents...