Treating Equals Unequally: Incentives in Teams, Workers’ Motivation and Production Technology The importance of fair and equal treatment of workers is at the heart of the debate in organizational management. In this regard, we study how reward mechanisms and production technologies affect effort provision in teams. Our experimental results demonstrate that unequal rewards can potentially increa...

In the hold-up problem incomplete contracts cause the proceeds of relation-specific investments to be allocated by ex-post bargaining. The present paper investigates the efficiency of incomplete contracts if individuals have heterogeneous preferences implying heterogeneous bargaining behavior and equally important preferences are private information. As the sunk investment costs can thus potent...

Scholars have debated the manner in which religious beliefs influence economic organization. This paper examines a particular case–the craft guilds of medieval England–to show how religious doctrines influence the ability of a group to enforce cooperation. When mortality rates are high, repeated interaction alone cannot sustain cooperation, but spiritual sanctions in the afterlife can sustain c...

In this paper we present a model of endogenous trade-policy formation which captures crucial aspects of the Japanese commercial and political culture. We analyze the influence of the portrayed cultural traits and show that cultural idiosyncrasies are important determinants of trade policy formation; especially the complex interaction of the two types of cultures is shown to have significant con...

This paper builds upon a view of economic organizations as problemsolving arrangements and presents a simple model of adaptive problemsolving driven by trial-and-error learning and collective selection. Institutional structures, and in particular their degree of decentralization, determines which solutions are tried out and undergo selection. It is shown that if the design problem at hand is “c...

This paper examines the effects of an exogenous shift in the cost of contractual completeness induced by workload spikes on the endogenous selection of procurement terms. I conduct an instrumental-variable estimation of the causal effect of workload on contracting. In a sample of 150−thousand contracts from 85 civilian procurement offices over 11 years, increases in contracting officer workload...

We show that the effect of eviction threats on unobservable investment effort can be positive. We demonstrate this apparently counter-intuitive result in a model of tenancy where investment by a tenant in the current period raises the chances of doing well in the next period, and therefore retaining the job in the period after next period. If the tenant earns rents, the landlord can partly subs...

Fixed-path methods (FPMs) were introduced to manage situations where several individuals jointly operate a single technology (see [4]). In the production context, they consist in allocating marginal increments of output according to a proportions vector which changes along an arbitrary path. While very appealing from an incentives viewpoint under diminishing marginal returns, the asymmetry of t...

We consider a setting in which the buyer’s ability to hold up a seller’s investment is so severe that there is no investment in equilibrium of the static game typically analyzed. We show that there exists an equilibrium of a related dynamic game generating positive investment. The seller makes a sequence of gradually smaller investments, each repaid by the buyer under the threat of losing furth...

This paper deals with a Niskanen type of public-procurement agency. It is shown that the procurement game should be separated into an investment game and a project game, the first game to be played before nature determines the actual realizations of benefit and costs of the project, the second game to be played afterward. In the first game the relationship-specific investments of agency and sel...