Social Relations and Relational Incentives

This paper studies how social relationships between managers and employees affect relational incentive contracts. To this end we develop a simple dynamic principal-agent model where both players may have feelings of altruism or spite toward each other. The contract may contain two types of incentives for the agent to work hard: a bonus and a threat of dismissal. We find that good social relationships undermine the credibility of a threat of dismissal but strengthen the credibility of a bonus. Among others, these two mechanisms imply that better social relationships sometimes lead to higher bonuses, while worse social relationships may increase productivity and players' utility in equilibrium

The Accidental Adventures of India McAllister

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/diversefamilies/2168/thumbnail.jp

Isolation and characterization of microsatellite loci from the endangered Mediterranean sponge Spongia agaricina (Demospongiae: Dictyoceratida).

4 páginas, 1 tabla.The abundance of the bath sponge Spongia agaricinahas decreased drastically in recent years and it is now considered an endangered species under Annex 3 of Bern and Barcelona conventions. We describe eight microsatellite markers and present data on their allelic variation and utility as high resolution genetic markers. We analyzed 36 individuals from two populations and found that the number of alleles per locus ranged between 1 and 7. Observed heterozygosity ranged from 0 to 0.72. We found deviations from Hardy–Weinberg expectations for some loci. We exclusively detected null alleles for those loci that deviated from Hardy–Weinberg expectations. Also, distributions of allele frequencies differed significantly between the two populations, making them suitable for population genetic analyses.Research funded by grants from the Agencia Nationale de la Recherche (ECIMAR), Spanish Ministry of Environment (119/2003), Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (CMT2007-66635) and the BIOCAPITAL project (MRTN-CT-2004- 512301) of the European Union.Peer reviewe