Principals can attempt to get agents to perform certain actions preferable to the principal by using ex-post punishments or rewards to align incentives. Field data is mixed on whether, and to what extent, such informal incentive contracting crowds out efficient solutions to the agency problem....

During the last two decades economists have made much progress in understanding incentives, contracts and organisations. Yet, they constrained their attention to a very narrow and empirically questionable view of human motivation. The purpose of this paper is to show that this narrow view of...

The standard agency model assumes that the agent does not care how his decisions influence others. This is a strong assumption, which we relax. We find that, although monetary incentives are effective also with sociallyattentive agents, the principal may optimally set none. This could explain...

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...