"Implicit Contracts, incentive compatibility, and involuntary unemployment" (MacLeod and Malcomson, 1989) remains our most highly cited work. We briefly review the development of this paper and of our subsequent related work, and conclude with reflections on the future of relational contract...

Revenue drift, where insufficient attention is given to economic, relative to social, goals, threatens social enterprise performance and survival. We argue that financial incentives can address this problem by redirecting employee attention to commercial tasks and attracting workers less...

What kind of incentives optimize a worker's motivation and perfor- mance, especially in remote work settings? We recruit online workers to work for up to 45 minutes on tedious tasks over three days. We randomly assign them to individualistic (Solo) or one of two team incentives. Under our...

Standard economics models require that financial incentives improve performance, while leading theories in psychology allow for the opposite. Experimental results are mixed, and so far have not been corrected for publication bias and model uncertainty. We collect 1,568 economics estimates...

We evaluate the quality of beliefs elicited from online respondents, comparing several characteristics of two widely used elicitation mechanisms (the Binarized Scoring Rule - BSR - and a stochastic variation of the Becker-deGroot-Marshak mechanism -BDM) against a flat fee baseline for a variety...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) based cost norms have attractive properties in the regulation of natural monopolies. However, they are also sensitive to the choice of cost drivers. When some of the cost drivers are discretionary, this may lead to suboptimal incentives. When a regulated firm...

Willingness to vaccinate and test are critical in the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the effects of two measures to increase vaccination and testing: "choice architecture" and monetary compensations. Choice architecture has the goal of "nudging" people into a socially desired direction without...

An extensive medical and occupational-health literature finds that an imbalance between effort and reward is an important stressor which produces serious health consequences. We incorporate these effects in a simple agency model with moral hazard and limitecl liability, and study their impact on...

Willingness to vaccinate and test are critical in the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the effects of two measures to increase vaccination and testing: "choice architecture" and monetary compensations. Choice architecture has the goal of "nudging" people into a socially desired direction without...

Willingness to vaccinate and test are critical in the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the effects of two measures to increase vaccination and testing: "choice architecture" and monetary compensations. Choice architecture has the goal of "nudging" people into a socially desired direction without...

Imagine the situation in which an econometrician can infer the distribution of welfare gains induced by the provision of higher education financial aid using survey data obtained from a set of individuals, and can estimate the same distribution using a highly incentivized field experiment in...

We study, theoretically and empirically, the effects of incentives on the self-selection and coordination of motivated agents to produce a social good. Agents join teams where they allocate effort to either generate individual monetary rewards (selfish effort) or contribute to the production of...

Tournaments are often used to improve performance in innovation contexts. Tournaments provide monetary incentives but also render teams’ identity and social-image concerns salient. We study the effects of tournaments on team performance in a non-routine task and identify the importance of...

We study, theoretically and empirically, the effects of incentives on the self-selection and coordination of motivated agents to produce a social good. Agents join teams where they allocate effort to either generate individual monetary rewards (selfish effort) or contribute to the production of...

We study, theoretically and empirically, the effects of incentives on the self-selection and coordination of motivated agents to produce a social good. Agents join teams where they allocate effort to either generate individual monetary rewards (selfish effort) or contribute to the production of...

Using a large-scale real effort experiment, we explore whether and how different peer assignment mechanisms affect worker performance and stress. Letting individuals choose whom to compare to increases productivity to the same extent as a targeted exogenous matching policy aimed at maximizing...

Using a large-scale real effort experiment, we explore whether and how different peer assignment mechanisms affect worker performance and stress. Letting individuals choose whom to compare to increases productivity to the same extent as a targeted exogenous matching policy aimed at maximizing...

Despite changing gender norms, few fathers decide to take parental leave after the birth of a child, and when they do, their leave spells are substantially shorter compared to mothers. This study examines how paternal leave-taking is affected by two key features of leave policies: flexibility in...

Background More than two years into the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, it remains unclear whether fnancial incentives can reduce vaccine hesitancy and improve uptake among key unvaccinated populations. This study estimated the willingness of racial/ethnic minority adults in the United...

This paper investigates the use of self-funded commitment contracts to support individuals in achieving their goals of increased physical activity. We compare the effect of soft (non-incentivised) commitment contracts with hard (incentivised) contracts using a randomised experiment with 1629...

Working time autonomy is often accompanied by output-based incentives to counterbalance the loss of monitoring that comes with granting autonomy. However, in such settings, overprovision of effort could arise if workers are uncertain whether their performance suffices to secure the output-based...

Within the frame of the Nordic welfare model, pension system design has taken very different routes. While the overall aims in terms of distribution and replacement rates are similar, the division of labour between defined benefit and contribution as well as pay-as-you-go versus funded schemes...

This work is divided into two complementary parts. In the first part, we develop a partial equilibrium model, through which it is possible to analyze the influence of tariff modicity and the illegal occupation of poles on four agents: energy distributors, telecommunications operators, and energy...

Economists and management scholars have argued that the scope of incentives to increase cooperation in organizations is limited as their use signals the prevalence of free-riding among employees. This paper tests this hypothesis experimentally, using a sample of managers and employees from a...

The paper studies whether a drought in 1788 affected the outbreak of peasant revolts during the French Revolution. I construct a community-level data set with information on local drought severity and peasant uprisings in 1789. Results indicate that those more affected by the drought more often...

We conduct a laboratory experiment among male participants to investigate whether rewarding schemes that depend on work performance - in particular, tournament incentives - induce more stress than schemes that are independent of performance - fixed payment scheme. Stress is measured over the...