Robust incentives for effort

Robust Incentives for Teams∗

This paper considers team incentive schemes that are robust to nonquantifiable uncertainty about the game played by the agents. A principal designs a contract for a team of agents, each taking an unobservable action that jointly determine a stochastic contractible outcome. The game is common knowledge among the agents, but the principal only knows some of the available action profiles. Realizin...

Optimal Effort Incentives in Dynamic Tournaments

Promotion Incentives and Teacher Effort in China

This paper examines the effort incentives of teachers in rural China. China employs a complex system of annual evaluations and promotions for civil servants in which good evaluations, along with a teacher's years of service and education, make teachers eligible to apply for rank promotions. A model of promotions is developed in which agents are both incentivized, and are sorted into ranks by ab...

Career Concerns Incentives and Teacher Effort

I present a generalization to the standard career concerns model and apply it to the public teacher labor market. In particular, this model provides three testable hypotheses: optimal teacher effort levels decline with experience all things equal, optimal effort declines with tenure at a particular school, and teachers shirk as incentives collapse at the end of a teacher’s career or tenure. Usi...

Optimal effort incentives in dynamic tournaments

This paper analyzes two-stage rank-order tournaments. A principal decides (i) how to spread prize money across the two periods, (ii) how to weigh performance in the two periods when awarding the second-period prize, and (iii) whether to reveal performance after the first period. The information revelation policy depends exclusively on properties of the effort cost function. The principal always...