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...

We examine the performance of 84 firms that adopt value-based management (VBM) systems during the period 1984-1997. The typical firm significantly improves matched-firm-adjusted residual income after adopting VBM. This improvement persists for the five post-adoption years studied. After controlling for possible sample bias, we find that large firms show less improvement than small firms. We fin...

This study provides a unified theoretical and experimental framework in which to compare three canonical types of competition: winner-take-all contests won by the best performer, winner-take-all lotteries where probability of success is proportional to performance, and proportional-prize contests in which rewards are shared in proportion to performance. We introduce random noise to reflect impe...

This paper studies the provision of incentives in a large U.S. training organization which is divided in about 50 independent pools of training agencies. The number and the size of the agencies within each pool vary greatly. Each pool distributes performance incentive awards to the training agencies it supervises, subject to two constraints: the awards cannot be negative and the sum of the awar...

Job Satisfaction and Co-worker Wages: Status or Signal? This paper uses matched employer-employee panel data to show that individual job satisfaction is higher when other workers in the same establishment are better-paid. This runs contrary to a large literature which has found evidence of income comparisons in subjective well-being. We argue that the difference hinges on the nature of the refe...

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...

Incentive Design and Trust: Comparing the Effects of Tournament and Team-Based Incentives on Trust We explore the extent to which the structure of incentives affects trust. We hypothesize that the degree to which different incentive mechanisms emphasize competition (via the perceived intentions of others) and entitlements (via the perceived property rights) will affect individuals’ subsequent b...

In theory, hedging restrictions faced by managers make executive stock options more difficult to value than ordinary options, because they imply that exercise policies of managers depend on their preferences and endowments. Using data on option exercises from 40 firms, this paper shows that a simple extension of the ordinary American option model which introduces random, exogenous exercise and ...

We examine the role of information-based stock trading in affecting the risk-incentive relation. By incorporating an endogenous informed trading into an optimal incentive contracting model, we analytically show that, apart from reducing incentives, a greater risk increases the level of information-based trading which consequently enhances executive incentives and offsets the negative risk-incen...

Do international trade and technological change influence how firms create incentives for human capital? I present a model that incorporates agency problems into a framework with firm heterogeneity and human capital. My model indicates that trade liberalizations and skill-biased technological change alter the way how the largest firms in an economy incentivize their managers. Increases in manag...