Discussion Paper No. 6
November 2, 2021
Long-Term Employment Relations when Agents Are Present Biased
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Abstract:
We analyze how agents’ present bias affects optimal contracting in an infinite- horizon employment setting. The principal maximizes profits by offering a menu of contracts to naive agents: a virtual contract – which agents plan to choose in the future – and a real contract which they end up choosing. This virtual contract motivates the agent and allows the principal to keep the agent below his outside option. Moreover, under limited liability, implemented effort can be inefficiently high. With a finite time horizon, the degree of exploitation of agents decreases over the life-cycle. While the baseline model abstracts from moral hazard, we show that the result persists also when allowing for non-contractible effort.
Keywords:
employment relations; dynamic contracting; present bias;
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Discussion Paper No. 5
Self-Confidence and Unraveling in Matching Markets
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We document experimentally how biased self-assessments affect the outcome of matching markets. In the experiments, we exogenously manipulate the self-confidence of participants regarding their relative performance by employing hard and easy real-effort tasks. We give participants the option to accept early offers when information about their performance has not been revealed, or to wait for the assortative matching based on their actual relative performance. Early offers are accepted more often when the task is hard than when it is easy. We show that the treatment effect works through a shift in beliefs, i.e., underconfident agents are more likely to accept early offers than overconfident agents. The experiment identifies a behavioral determinant of unraveling, namely biased self-assessments, which can lead to penalties for underconfident individuals as well as efficiency losses.
Keywords:
market unraveling; experiment; self-confidence; matching markets;
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Discussion Paper No. 4
How Antitrust Enforcement Can Spur Innovation
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We study the 1956 consent decree against the Bell System to investigate whether patents held by a dominant firm are harmful for innovation and if so, whether compulsory licensing can provide an effective remedy. The consent decree settled an antitrust lawsuit that charged Bell with having foreclosed the market for telecommunications equipment. The terms of the decree allowed Bell to remain a vertically integrated monopolist in the telecommunications industry, but as a remedy, Bell had to license all its existing patents royalty-free. Thus, the path-breaking technologies developed by the Bell Laboratories became freely available to all US companies. We show that in the first five years compulsory licensing increased follow-on innovation building on Bell patents by 17%. This effect is driven mainly by young and small companies. Yet, innovation increased only outside the telecommunications equipment industry. The lack of a positive innovation effect in the telecommunications industry suggests that market foreclosure impedes innovation and that compulsory licensing without structural remedies is ineffective in ending it. The increase of follow-on innovation by small and young companies is in line with the hypothesis that patents held by a dominant firm act as a barrier to entry for start-ups. We show that the removal of this barrier increased long-run U.S. innovation, corroborating historical accounts.
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Discussion Paper No. 3
Certification and Market Transparency
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In markets with quality unobservable to buyers, third-party certification is often the only instrument to increase transparency. While both sellers and buyers have a demand for certification, its role differs fundamentally: sellers use it for signaling, buyers use it for inspection. Seller induced certification leads to more transparency, because it is informative – even if unused. By contrast, buyer induced certification incentivizes certifiers to limit transparency, as this raises demand for inspection. Whenever transparency is socially beneficial, seller certification is preferable. It also yields certifiers larger profits, so that regulating the mode of certification is redundant.
Keywords:
market transparency; certification; information and product quality; asymmetric information;
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Discussion Paper No. 2
A Theory of Crowdfunding
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Crowdfunding provides innovation in enabling entrepreneurs to contract with consumers before investment. Under aggregate demand uncertainty, this improves screening for valuable projects. Entrepreneurial moral hazard and private cost in- formation threatens this benefit. Crowdfunding’s after-markets enable consumers to actively implement deferred payments and thereby manage moral hazard. Popular crowdfunding platforms offer schemes that allow consumers to do so through con- ditional pledging behavior. Efficiency is sustainable only if expected returns exceed an agency cost associated with the entrepreneurial incentive problems. By reducing demand uncertainty, crowdfunding promotes welfare and complements traditional entrepreneurial financing, which focuses on controlling moral hazard.
Keywords:
crowdfunding; entrepreneurship; moral hazard; demand uncertainty;
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Discussion Paper No. 1
January 7, 2017
You Owe Me
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In business and politics, gifts are often aimed at influencing the recipient at the expense of third parties. In an experimental study, which removes informational and incentive confounds, subjects strongly respond to small gifts even though they understand the gift giver’s intention. Our findings question existing models of social preferences. They point to anthropological and sociological theories about gifts creating an obligation to reciprocate. We capture these effects in a simple extension of existing models. We show that common policy responses (disclosure, size limits) may be ineffective, consistent with our model. Financial incentives are effective but can backfire.
Keywords:
gift exchange; externalities; lobbyism; corruption; reciprocity; social preferences;
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Discussion Paper No. 203
October 22, 2021
Belief Updating: Does the 'Good-News, Bad-News' Asymmetry Extend to Purely Financial Domains?
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Bayes' statistical rule remains the status quo for modeling belief updating in both normative and descriptive models of behavior under uncertainty. Some recent research has questioned the use of Bayes' rule in descriptive models of behavior, presenting evidence that people overweight 'good news' relative to 'bad news' when updating ego-relevant beliefs. In this paper, we present experimental evidence testing whether this 'good-news, bad-news' effect is present in a financial decision making context (i.e. a domain that is important for understanding much economic decision making). We find no evidence of asymmetric updating in this domain. In contrast, in our experiment, belief updating is close to the Bayesian benchmark on average. However, we show that this average behavior masks substantial heterogeneity in individual updating. We find no evidence in support of a sizeable subgroup of asymmetric updators.
Keywords:
economic experiments; bayes' rule; belief updating; belief measurement; proper scoring rule; motivated beliefs;
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