Summary It is often argued in economics that building a reputation for trustworthiness could help individuals or firms to mitigate or even overcome problems of contractual incompleteness. In this paper, we use data from the German eBay website to test whether a seller’s bad reputation has an...

We consider a double-sided moral hazard problem where each party can renege on the signed contract since there does not exist any verifi- able performance signal. It is shown that ex-post litigation can restore incentives of the agent. Moreover, when the litigation can be settled by the parties...

In some sports leagues, the sports association sells broadcasting rights centrally in order to create competitive balance. In other ones, the market is decentral. As a result, there is competitive imbalance. In this paper, the preferred kind of marketing of sports associations is analysed....

The benefits and costs of different forms of job design have been analyzed in the literature yet. The focus has thereby mostly been on job designs under formal contracts between the parties. However, in the real world relational contracts - informal agreements sustained by the value of future...

In this paper, we consider the market for video games, where some firms are active in both, the market for video games hardware and software. It is puzzling that hardware can be easily made compatible with duplicated (i.e. pirated) software. We ask, whether there exist strategic reasons...

In a principal-agent setup, we investigate agents disclosure of conflict of interests revealing deliberate or undeliberate kindness and its affect on principals reciprocal behavior. To this end, we firstly introduce a theoretical model refering to Hart and Moore (2008) which captures aspects of...

We analyze the interaction of explicit and implicit contracts in a model with selfish and fair principals. Fair principals are willing to honor implicit agreements, selfish principals are not. We investigate a separating equilibrium in which principals reveal their type through the contract...

We consider a dismissal tournament where the loser gets fired. Although the firm takes possible selection failures into account when choosing the optimal tournament design, the selection efficiency of a dismissal tournament is often rather low. This is because low-ability workers, possessing...