Learning by Choosing: Career Concerns with Observable Actionst

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ke, T. Tony; Li, Christopher; Safronov, Mikhail
• 署名单位: Chinese University of Hong Kong; Vanderbilt University; University of Cambridge
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MICROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7669
• DOI: 10.1257/mic.20200192
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 536-567
• 关键词: economics; EXISTENCE; wage

摘要

This paper explores potential inefficiencies of incomplete contracts in a dynamic career concerns context. In a firm-worker relationship, the worker performs public tasks that have trade-offs between pro-ductivity and informativeness. We show that the first-best outcome can be obtained with short-term contracts if the wage can depend on the task choice. This provides an explanation for wage jumps at promotions-the worker is assigned the more productive but less informative task after promotion. If task choice is not contractible, then inefficiency arises: the worker has an endogenous bias toward informativeness, while the firm is biased toward productivity. (JEL D82, D83, D86, J24, J31, M51)