78 research outputs found
Cooperation and mistrust in relational contracts
Work and trade relationships are often governed by relational contracts, in which incentives for cooperative action today stem from the prospective future benefits of the relationship. In this paper, we study how reductions in clarity about the financial consequences of actions, induced by incomplete information about the costs of providing quality, affect relational contracts in buyer-seller relationships. Under incomplete information, payoffs to actions become private information. This can impede the joint understanding of what constitutes cooperative behavior, and may thus inject mistrust into relationships, even if credibility is held constant. Comparing seller-buyer relationships with and without complete information about seller costs in the laboratory, we find that such a lack of clarity has effects on the terms of relational contracts. However, these effects only concern the distribution of rents, and not efficiency
Cooperation and Mistrust in Relational Contracts
Work and trade relationships are often governed by relational contracts, in which incentives for cooperative action today stem from the prospective future benefits of the relationship. In this paper, we study how reductions in clarity about the financial consequences of actions, induced by incomplete information about the costs of providing quality, affect relational contracts in buyer-seller relationships. Under incomplete information, payoffs to actions become private information. This can impede the joint understanding of what constitutes cooperative behavior, and may thus inject mistrust into relationships, even if credibility is held constant. Comparing seller-buyer relationships with and without complete information about seller costs in the laboratory, we find that such a lack of clarity has effects on the terms of relational contracts. However, these effects only concern the distribution of rents, and not efficiency
Honesty and Relational Contracts
We study the economic consequences of opportunities for dishonesty in an environment where efficiency relevant behaviour is not contractible, but rather incentivized by informal agreements in an ongoing relationship. We document the repeated interaction between a principal and an agent who, within our main treatment, was privately informed about the costs of effort provision being either high or low. At the beginning of the interaction, an agent could either truthfully report the cost type to the principal or choose to lie about it. We find that a substantial fraction of low cost agents decided to signal high costs. Dishonest low cost and honest high cost agents pool on the complete information outcome with high costs, as measured in our control treatment. The outcome of such pooling is less efficient than for honest low cost agents. Moreover, principals who face dishonest agents earn substantially less profits than those facing honest agents. Our evidence therefore suggests that informal agreements in a repeated interaction generate less efficient outcomes if dishonesty is possible but, at the same time, are robust to substantial degrees of deception. We furthermore show that our experimental findings can be organized using the logic of repeated games
Probing relaxation times in graphene quantum dots
Graphene quantum dots are attractive candidates for solid-state quantum bits.
In fact, the predicted weak spin-orbit and hyperfine interaction promise spin
qubits with long coherence times. Graphene quantum dot devices have been
extensively investigated with respect to their excitation spectrum,
spin-filling sequence, and electron-hole crossover. However their relaxation
dynamics remain largely unexplored. This is mainly due to challenges in device
fabrication, in particular regarding the control of carrier confinement and the
tunability of the tunnelling barriers, both crucial to experimentally
investigate decoherence times. Here, we report on pulsed-gate transient
spectroscopy and relaxation time measurements of excited states in graphene
quantum dots. This is achieved by an advanced device design, allowing to tune
the tunnelling barriers individually down to the low MHz regime and to monitor
their asymmetry with integrated charge sensors. Measuring the transient
currents through electronic excited states, we estimate lower limit of charge
relaxation times on the order of 60-100 ns.Comment: To be published in Nature Communications. The first two authors
contributed equally to this work. Main article: 10 pages, 4 figures.
Supplementary information: 4 pages, 4 figure
- âŠ