We build a simple model to show that relationships and high-powered formal contracts can be either substitutes or complements, depending on the relative impact of relationships on incentive problems and contracting costs. Empirically, in the offshore drilling industry we find that oil and gas companies are less likely to choose high-powered fixed-price contracts as the intensity of their relati...

We allocate agents to three kinds of hierarchical positions: top, medium, and low. No monetary transfers are allowed. We solve for the incentive-compatible (IC) mechanisms that maximize a family of weighted social welfares that includes utilitarian and Rawlsian welfares. When the market is tough (all agents bear positive risk of obtaining a low position in any IC and feasible mechanism), then t...

User community plays an important role in online trading platforms. It provides users a place to communicate, to solve problems and to exchange information with each other on an online trading platform which faced a bilateral market —seller and buyer participants. Beginning with the incentive strategy, this paper studies the influence of material and spiritual incentive strategies on online tra...

User community plays an important role in online trading platforms. It provides users a place to communicate, to solve problems and to exchange information with each other on an online trading platform which faced a bilateral market —seller and buyer participants. Beginning with the incentive strategy, this paper studies the influence of material and spiritual incentive strategies on online tra...

BACKGROUND Fentanyl-induced cough (FIC) has a reported incidence of 13-65% on induction of anesthesia. Incentive spirometry (IS) creates forceful inspiration, while stretching pulmonary receptors. We postulated that spirometry just before the fentanyl (F) bolus would decrease the incidence and severity of FIC. METHODS This study enrolled 200 patients aged 18-60 years and with American Society...

Risk-shifting incentive problem in financial contracting, which typically arises in the context of a lenderborrower relationship, stands for the borrower’s incentive to influence the risk of his project. Thus, the borrower can increase the value of his payoff at the expense of the lender. However, the lender also may have a risk incentive under some circumstances so that he may render it diffic...

Background: In 2012, Switzerland changed from retrospective to prospective hospital payment based on diagnosis related groups (DRGs), following the example of the United States, Australia, and Germany. As in these countries, the objective of this transition was to motivate hospitals to improve efficiency by making them bear financial risk to some extent.Objective:...

Pavlovian cues for rewards become endowed with incentive salience, guiding "wanting" to their learned reward. Usually, cues are "wanted" only if their rewards have ever been "liked," but here we show that mesocorticolimbic systems can recompute "wanting" de novo by integrating novel physiological signals with a cue's preexisting associations to an outcome that lacked hedonic value. That is, a c...