102 research outputs found
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Prizes and Incentives: Towards a General Theory of Compensation and Competition
This article analyzes the role of competitive compensation schemes (in which pay depends on relative performance) in economies with imperfect information. These compensation schemes have desirable risk, incentive, and flexibility properties; they provide for an automatic adjustment of rewards and incentives in response to common changes in the environment. When environmental uncertainty is large, such schemes are shown to be preferable to individualistic reward structures; in the limit, as the number of contestants becomes large, expected utility may approach the first-best (perfect information) level. We study the design of contests, including the optimal use of prizes versus punishments and absolute versus relative performance standards. The analysis can also be viewed as a contribution to the multi-agent, single-principal problem
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The Welfare Effects of Metering Ties
Critics of current tying doctrine argue that metering ties can increase consumer welfare and total welfare without increasing output and that they generally increase both welfare measures. Contrary to those claims, we prove that metering ties lower consumer welfare and total welfare unless they increase capital good output. We further provide conditions under which metering ties always harm consumer welfare for all uniform and lognormal distributions of consumable usage rates. Finally, we show that with a lognormal distribution, metering ties also lower total welfare absent a large dispersion in desired usage of the metered good. These findings support current tying doctrine, which presumptively condemns ties with market power absent proof of an offsetting procompetitive justification
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