It may be surprising that one of the most popular compensation schemes in business is so open to being hacked - to having managers cheat to win. We explore tournament theory to detail its vulnerabilities to various forms of cheating unilateral and multilateral. We identify who is most likely to...

This monograph presents existing and new research on three approaches to multiagent incentives: simpler mechanisms, robust mechanisms, and implicit contracts. The goal of all three approaches is to find theories that better explain observed institutions than the standard approach has

Incentives often distort behavior: they induce agents to exert effort but this effort is not employed optimally. This paper proposes a theory of incentive design allowing for such distorted behavior. At the heart of the theory is a trade-off between getting the agent to exert effort and ensuring...

Should principals explain and justify their evaluations? In this paper the principal's evaluation is private information, but she can provide justification by sending a costly cheap-talk message. I show that the principal explains her evaluation to the agent if the evaluation turns out to be...

The market for retail financial products (e.g. investment funds or insurance) is marred by information asymmetries. Clients are not well informed about the quality of these products. They have to rely on the recommendations of advisors. Incentives of advisors and clients may not be aligned, when...

We examine the effects of incentives in a simple model, where a set of rational agents works on a joint task. In the static model, we show that higher incentives (i.e., higher rewards for success) positively affect the success rate and the agents’ payoffs. This is in contrast to the dynamic...

This paper presents a model of a firm that backdates the granting of executive stock options in order to maximize actual compensation for a given level of reported compensation. The model is used to estimate the magnitude of the difference between the actual and reported values of option grants....