A hedonic analysis of principal-agent employment contracts is developed in which workers and employers exchange labor services and contractual payment patterns and is applied to contract data from a household-level survey in rural China in 1935. The results indicate that credit market...

Among the oldest and most pervasive economic institutions are bonded labor and serfdom. While seemingly exploitative, both bonded labor and serfdom are often not imposed on the laborers but voluntarily chosen. It is generally the lack of suitable alternatives which makes workers opt for a life...

Among the oldest and most pervasive economic institutions are bonded labor and serfdom. While seemingly exploitative, both bonded labor and serfdom are often not imposed on the laborers but voluntarily chosen. It is generally the lack of suitable alternatives which makes workers opt for a life...

One of the long-standing puzzles in economics is why wages do not fall sufficiently in recessions so as to avoid increases in unemployment. Put differently, if the competitive market wage declines, why don't employers simply force their employees to accept lower wages as well? As an alternative...

The efficiency wage model of Shapiro and Stiglitz (American Economic Review 74: 433-444, 1984) has not always been confirmed by empirical investigations. This could be due to informational problems. Reformulating the Shapiro and Stiglitz model as a sequential game, this paper examines the...

This paper develops a model of pricing and advertising in a matching environment with capacity constrained sellers. Sellers' expenditure on directly informative advertising attracts consumers only probabilistically. Consumers who happen to observe advertisements randomize over the advertised...

We study an infinitely repeated game where two players with equal discount factors play a simultaneous-move stage game. Player one monitors the stage- game actions of player two imperfectly, while player two monitors the pure stage- game actions of player one perfectly. Player one’s type is...

We investigate the differences and connections between discrete-space and continuous-space social interaction models. Although our class of continuous-space model has a unique equilibrium, we find that discretized models can have multiple equilibria for any degree of discretization, which...

In this paper we study a multi-stage elimination contest with non-sunk bids: differently from existing literature, we realize that when players are budget-constrained, they do not regard past bids as strategically irrelevant in their decision of how much to bid in following stages. This happens...

We analyze a team formation process that generalizes matching models and network formation models, allowing for overlapping teams of heterogeneous size. We apply different notions of stability: myopic team-wise stability, which extends to our setup the concept of pair-wise stability, coalitional...