Since the mid 2000s, a cottage industry has slowly blossomed of empirical research dedicated to advancing accounts of contracts “on the books” — accounting for what contracts tend to purportedly obligate signers to do, and contracts “in action” — accounting for how contracting...

Rational parties enter into a contract if the agreement is mutually beneficial. However, after the contract is formed, changes to the costs and/or benefits of performance may render the original contract undesirable. In this paper, we carry out an incentivized experiment to study the effect of...

We consider an in nitely repeated reappointment game in a principal- agent relationship. Typical examples are voter-politician or government- public servant relationships. The agent chooses costly effort and enjoys being in office until he is deselected. The principal observes a noisy signal of...

In this note, we experimentally examine the relative performance of price-only auctions and multi-attribute auctions. We do so in procurement settings where the buyer can give the winning bidder incentives to exert effort on non-price dimensions after the auction. Both auctions theoretically...

I show that stochastic contracts generate powerful incentives when agents suffer from probability distortion. When implementing these contracts, the principal can target probability distortions in order to inflate the agent's perceived benefits of exerting high levels of effort. This novel...

Principal-agent problems are pervasive in economic settings. CEOs and shareholders, lawyers and clients, manufacturers and retailers, lenders and borrowers are all examples of settings in which moral hazard problems might arise. Incentive contracts in both individual and team environments have...

This paper shows one type of asymmetric information problems, their theoretical implications, the design of contracts that mitigate them, as well as some experimental evidence. Furthermore, by extrapolating the results, the paper tries to illustrate certain macroeconomic implications obtained...

Sloof et al.'s [2006] elegant study of default breach remedies illustrates both the potential and limitations of experimental law and economics (ELE). Potentially, the rigorous methodology of experimental economics can provide fully controlled tests of relationships among legally significant...

Diese Arbeit analysiert die wesentlichen Elemente der Vertragsstrukturen in der Venture Capital-Industrie. Aufbauend auf einem sehr umfangreichen und detaillierten Datensatz, der die Verträge zwischen Venture Capital-Investoren und deren Portfoliounternehmen abbildet, werden die Kontroll-,...