We analyze the optimal combination of promotion tournaments and individual performance pay in an employment relationship. An agent’s effort is non-observable and he has private information about his suitability for promotion. Thus, promotion tournaments and individual performance pay need to be combined to serve both incentive and selection purposes. We find that, if it is sufficiently importan...

We present a model highlighting one advantage of negotiation over posted prices from the seller’s perspective. In the process, we develop a general methodology for studying mechanism design with weaker incentive constraints. To do so, we introduce the notion of an incentive graph, which encodes the relevant constraints. This construction is relevant when agents possess hard evidence, when they ...

Researchers, using contingent valuation (CV) to value changes in nonmarket goods, typically believe respondents always answer questions truthfully or they answer truthfully only when it is in their interest to do so. The second position, while consistent with economic theory, implies that interpreting survey responses depends critically on the incentive structure provided. We derive simple test...

This article discusses the limitations of the orthodox economic theory of the firm as a nexus of contracts. Various experimental studies have shown that the aggregation of individuals in groups changes behavior and preferences systematically. This perspective has been formalized by models of interdependent preferences. Based on a prominent approach of interdependent preferences, intention-based...

The role of health in economic development is tested using three empirical approaches: a direct labour productivity effect, an interactive effect, and an incentive effect. Using proxies for health such as access to sanitation facility, clean water, immunisation, and adult male mortality, higher levels of health are hypothesised to promote higher economic growth as healthier workers are more pro...

We propose a new business cycle theory. Firms need to randomize over firing or keeping workers who have performed poorly in the past, in order to give them an ex-ante incentive to exert effort. Firms have an incentive to coordinate the outcome of their randomizations, as coordination allows them to load the firing probability on states of the world in which it is costlier for workers to become ...

The optimal allocation of resources in complex environments—like allocation of dynamic wireless spectrum, cloud computing services, and Internet advertising—is computationally challenging even given the true preferences of the participants. In the theory and practice of optimization in complex environments, a wide variety of special and general purpose algorithms have been developed; these algo...

We consider a perfectly competitive ex ante economy with a continuum of agents and negligible asymmetric information. For such an economy we recast the basic classical results on the existence of Walrasian equilibrium, core equivalence, and the blocking size of coalitions. Moreover, we examine the incentive compatibility of the ex ante Pareto, core and Walrasian allocations. © 2007 Elsevier Inc...

Standard incentive theory models provide a rich framework for studying informational problems but assume that contracts can be perfectly enforced. This paper studies the design of self-enforced relational contracts. I show that optimal contracts often can take a simple stationary form, but that self-enforcement restricts promised compensation and affects incentive provision. With hidden informa...