A number of papers have posited that there is a relationship between institutional structure and pro-social behaviour, in particular donated labour, in the delivery of public services, such as health, social care and education. However, there has been very little empirical research that attempts...

The paper outlines various measures of profitability and considers what role they can play in competition law. We argue that profitability measures can provide a good answer to the wrong question and a much less good answer to the question we really want to answer. Using appropriate definitions...

The glass ceiling is one of the most controversial and emotive aspects of employment in organisations. This paper provides a model of the glass ceiling that exhibits the following features that are frequently thought to characterise the problem: (i) there is a lower number of female employees in...

This paper discusses proposed governance reforms of legal services markets. The model distinguishes between a status quo position supported by a system of professionally enforced collective reputation and forms of governance based more squarely on market mechanisms. We identify a number of...

In the 'glass ceiling' debate there appear to be two strongly held and opposing interpretations of the evidence, one suggesting it is really the result of gender differences and the other that there is discrimination by gender. This paper provides an economic theory of the glass ceiling and one...

Anecdotal, empirical, and experimental evidence suggests that offering extrinsic rewards for certain activities can reduce people's willingness to engage in those activities voluntarily. We propose a simple rationale for this `crowding out' phenomenon, using standard economic arguments. The...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

In multiple-task hidden-action models, the (mis-)allocation of effort may play an important role for benefit creation. Signals which capture this benefit and which are used in incentive schemes should thus not only be judged by the noise and the associated costs but also by the mis-allocation...

What is the motivational effect of imposing a minimum effort requirement? Agents may no longer exert voluntary effort but merely meet the requirement. Here, we examine how such hidden costs of control change when control is considered legitimate. We study a principal-agent model where control...