We investigate how explicit performance incentives in incomplete employment contracts interact with agents’ voluntary cooperation in one-shot and repeated gift-exchange experiments. If contracts are incentive compatible, agents choose their best-reply effort and there is no voluntary cooperation. By contrast, there is substantial voluntary cooperation if the contract is not incentive compatible...

In this paper we provide experimental evidence indicating that incentive contracts may cause a strong crowding out of reciprocity-driven voluntary cooperation. This crowding out effect constitutes costs of incentive provision that have been largely neglected by economists. In our experiments the crowding out effect is so strong that the incentive contracts are less efficient than contracts with...

We investigate experimentally how explicit performance incentives in incomplete employment contracts interact with agents’ voluntary cooperation in one-shot and repeated gift-exchange experiments. If contracts are incentive compatible, agents choose their bestreply effort and there is no voluntary cooperation. By contrast, there is substantial voluntary cooperation if the contract is not incent...

A so-called "incentive contract" is a linear payment schedule, where the buyer pays a fixed fee plus some proportion of audited project cost. That remaining proportion of project cost borne by the seller is called the "sharing ratio." A higher sharing ratio creates more incentive to reduce costs. But it also makes the agent bear more cost uncertainty, requiring as compensation a greater fixed f...

We look at a principal–agent model in which the agent has to perform an action, the difficulty of which is better known ex interim than ex ante. We compare two contracting regimes; one with commitment to an ex ante negotiated contract, and one with an ex interim negotiated contract. The ex ante contract can not be too steep, but attempts to negotiate a steeper ex interim contract may result in ...

We study a labour market in which ...rms can observe workers’ output but not their e¤ort, and in which a worker’s productivity in a given ...rm depends on a worker-...rm speci...c component, unobservable for the ...rm. Firms o¤er wage contracts that optimally trade o¤ effort and wage costs. As a result, employed workers enjoy rents, which in turn create unemployment. We show that the incentive ...