Pay For Performance and Beyond

In this lecture, I will talk about my work on incentive contracts, especially incentives related to moral hazard. I will provide a narrative of my intellectual journey from models narrowly focused on pay for performance to models that see the scope of the incentive problem in much broader terms featuring multitasking employees and rms making extensive use of non nancial instruments in designing coherent incentive systems. I will highlight the key moments of this journey, including misunderstandings as well as new insights. e former are oen precursors to the latter. In the process, I hope to convey a sense of how I work with models. ere is no one right way about theorizing, but I believe it is important to develop a consistent style with which one is comfortable. I begin with a brief account of the roundabout way in which I became an economist. It reveals the origins of my interest in incentive problems and accounts for my life long association with business practice, something that has strongly inuenced my research and style of work.