We analyze optimal incentive contracts in a model where the probability of court enforcement is determined by the costs spent on contracting. We show that contract costs matter for incentive provision, both in static spot contracts and repeated game relational contracts. We find that social...

In this paper we present results from a large scale real effort experiment in an online labor market investigating the effect of performance pay and two common leadership techniques: Positive expectations and specific goals. We find that positive expectations have a significant negative effect...

We conduct a field experiment in a controlled work environment to investigate the effect of motivational talk and its interaction with monetary incentives. We find that motivational talk significantly improves performance only if it is accompanied by performance pay. Moreover, performance pay...

We present a model in which a motivator can take costly actions - or what we call motivational effort - in order to reduce the effort costs of a worker, and analyze the optimal combination of motivational effort and monetary incentives. We distinguish two cases. First, the firm owner chooses the...

We analyze relational contracts for a set of agents when either (a) only aggregate output or (b) individual outputs are observable. A team incentive scheme, where each agent is paid a bonus for aggregate output above a threshold, is optimal in case (a). The team's efficiency may increase...