This paper presents a novel inkjet-printed near-field ultra-high-frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) tag/sensor design with uniform magnetic field characteristics. The proposed tag is designed using the theory of characteristics mode (TCM). Moreover, uniformity current and performance achieved by further optimizing particle swarm optimization (PSO). Compared to traditional ele...

When contracting is not possible, a preference for fair exchange can generate efficient exchange, fully exhausting the potential gains from trade — or no exchange at all, leaving all gains from trade unexploited. A profit-maximizing firm offers a wage to a fair-minded worker, who then chooses how much effort to exert. The Rotten Firm theorem says: if the worker cares sufficiently about fairness...

Gibbons (1998) identifies a tradeoff between up-or-stay and up-or-out promotion rules. Upor-stay never wastes skills of those not promoted but may provide insufficient incentives to invest in skills. Up-or-out on the other hand can always induce investment in skill acquisition but may waste the skills of those not promoted. This paper reports about an experiment designed to study this tradeoff....

Economists and sociologists disagree over markets’ potential to assume functions typically performed by networks of personal connections, first among them the transmission of information. This paper begins from a model of labor markets where social ties are stronger between similar individuals and firms employing productive workers prefer to rely on personal referrals than to hire on the anonym...

This paper argues that the textbook search and matching model cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies in response to shocks of a plausible magnitude. In the United States, the standard deviation of the vacancy-unemployment ratio is almost 20 times as large as the standard deviation of average labor productivity, while the search model...

Job Durations with Worker and Firm Specific Effects: MCMC Estimation with Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data We study job durations using a multivariate hazard model allowing for worker-specific and firm-specific unobserved determinants. The latter are captured by unobserved heterogeneity terms or random effects, one at the firm level and another at the worker level. This enables us to decompo...

In this paper we have investigated how the employment relationship, if it implies transfer of rents, may allow employers to control the voting behavior of their workers and lead to a strategic registration of voters. This is feasible when individual voting behavior is observable, as in open ballot elections. More easily controlled voters are more likely registered providing an even larger impac...

We study the optimal incentive schemes for multistage projects. Staged financing, pervasive in both venture capital and research funding, arises as a feature of the optimal contract. The nature of progress plays an important role. When progress is tangible, incentives are provided through a series of deadlines and a reward scheme that decreases over time. Early progress in one stage gives the a...

During the last two decades economists have made much progress in understanding incentives, contracts and organizations. Yet, they constrained their attention to a very narrow and empirically questionable view of human motivation. The purpose of this paper is to show that this narrow view of human motivation may severely limit understanding the determinants and e0ects of incentives. Economists ...

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 in servitude. This paper shows that the existence of these voluntary forms of servitude itself may res...