IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/trf/wpaper/361.html

Institutions and Contract Enforcement

Author

Listed:
  • Falk, Armin
  • Huffman, David
  • Macleod, W. Bentley

Abstract

We provide evidence on how two important types of institutions – dismissal barriers, and bonus pay – affect contract enforcement behavior in a market with incomplete contracts and repeated interactions. Dismissal barriers are shown to have a strong negative impact on worker performance, and market efficiency, by interfering with firms' use of firing threat as an incentive device. Dismissal barriers also distort the dynamics of worker effort levels over time, cause firms to rely more on the spot market for labor, and create a distribution of relationship lengths in the market that is more extreme, with more very short and more very long relationships. The introduction of a bonus pay option dramatically changes the market outcome. Firms are observed to substitute bonus pay for threat of firing as an incentive device, almost entirely offsetting the negative incentive and efficiency effects of dismissal barriers. Nevertheless, contract enforcement behavior remains fundamentally changed, because the option to pay bonuses causes firms to rely less on long-term relationships. Our results show that market outcomes are the result of a complex interplay between contract enforcement policies and the institutions in which they are embedded.

Suggested Citation

  • Falk, Armin & Huffman, David & Macleod, W. Bentley, 2011. "Institutions and Contract Enforcement," Discussion Paper Series of SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems 361, Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich.
    • Handle: RePEc:trf:wpaper:361
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13193/1/361.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brice Corgnet & Roberto Hernán-Gonzalez & Stephen Rassenti, 2013. "Firing Threats and Tenure: Incentive effects and impression management," Working Papers 13-15, Chapman University, Economic Science Institute.
    2. Charness, Gary & Du, Ninghua & Yang, Chun-Lei & Yao, Lan, 2013. "Promises in contract design," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 194-208.
    3. Kopányi-Peuker, Anita & Offerman, Theo & Sloof, Randolph, 2018. "Team production benefits from a permanent fear of exclusion," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 103(C), pages 125-149.
    4. Brown, Martin & Serra-Garcia, Marta, 2011. "The Threat of Exclusion and Relational Contracting," Discussion Papers in Economics 12287, University of Munich, Department of Economics.
    5. Elwyn Davies & Marcel Fafchamps, 2017. "When No Bad Deed Goes Punished: Relational Contracting in Ghana versus the UK," NBER Working Papers 23123, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Brandts, Jordi & Corgnet, Brice & Hernán-González, Roberto & Ortiz, José Mª & Solà, Carles, 2021. "Watching or not watching? Access to information and the incentive effects of firing threats," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 189(C), pages 672-685.
    7. Brice Corgnet & Joaquín Gómez-Miñambres & Roberto Hernán-González, 2015. "Goal Setting and Monetary Incentives: When Large Stakes Are Not Enough," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(12), pages 2926-2944, December.
    8. Englmaier, Florian & Segal, Carmit, 2016. "Morale, Relationships, and Wages: An Experimental Study," VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change 145662, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    9. Charness, Gary & Kuhn, Peter, 2011. "Lab Labor: What Can Labor Economists Learn from the Lab?," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 3, pages 229-330, Elsevier.
    10. Dohmen, Thomas, 2014. "Behavioral labor economics: Advances and future directions," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 71-85.
    11. Johannes Abeler & Steffen Altmann & Sebastian Kube & Matthias Wibral, 2010. "Gift Exchange and Workers' Fairness Concerns: When Equality is Unfair," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 8(6), pages 1299-1324, December.
    12. Limin Gao & Sajid Anwar, 2024. "Labour market rigidity and firm innovation," Australian Economic Papers, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 63(2), pages 237-257, June.
    13. Boosey, Luke & Goerg, Sebastian, 2020. "The timing of discretionary bonuses – effort, signals, and reciprocity," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 254-280.
    14. Martin Brown & Marta Serra-Garcia, 2017. "The Threat of Exclusion and Implicit Contracting," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(12), pages 4081-4100, December.
    15. W. Bentley MacLeod & James M. Malcomson, 2023. "Implicit Contracts, Incentive Compatibility, and Involuntary Unemployment: Thirty Years On," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 179(3-4), pages 470-499.
    16. Corgnet, Brice & Hernán-González, Roberto & Rassenti, Stephen, 2015. "Firing threats: Incentive effects and impression management," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 97-113.
    17. Sangheon Lee & Deirdre McCann & Nina Torm, 2008. "The World Bank's “Employing Workers” index: Findings and critiques – A review of recent evidence," International Labour Review, International Labour Organization, vol. 147(4), pages 416-432, December.
    18. Cheikh Loucoubar & Richard Paul & Avner Bar-Hen & Augustin Huret & Adama Tall & Cheikh Sokhna & Jean-François Trape & Alioune Badara Ly & Joseph Faye & Abdoulaye Badiane & Gaoussou Diakhaby & Fatoumat, 2011. "An Exhaustive, Non-Euclidean, Non-Parametric Data Mining Tool for Unraveling the Complexity of Biological Systems – Novel Insights into Malaria," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(9), pages 1-16, September.
    19. Charness, Gary & Cobo-Reyes, Ramón & Jiménez, Natalia & Lacomba, Juan A. & Lagos, Francisco, 2017. "Job security and long-term investment: An experimental analysis," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 195-214.
    20. Bernard, Mark & Fanning, Jack & Yuksel, Sevgi, 2018. "Finding cooperators: Sorting through repeated interaction," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 147(C), pages 76-94.
    21. Revkin, Mara Redlich & Ahram, Ariel I., 2020. "Perspectives on the rebel social contract: Exit, voice, and loyalty in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 132(C).
    22. Bigoni Maria & Spagnolo Giancarlo & Valbonesi Paola, 2014. "Sticks and Carrots in Procurement: An Experimental Exploration," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 14(3), pages 893-936, July.
    23. Davies, Elwyn & Fafchamps, Marcel, 2021. "When no bad deed goes punished: Relational contracting in Ghana and the UK," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 191(C), pages 714-737.
    24. Maria Bigoni & Giancarlo Spagnolo & Paola Valbonesi, 2010. "Sticks and Carrots in Procurement," CEIS Research Paper 157, Tor Vergata University, CEIS, revised 28 May 2010.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • J41 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Labor Contracts
    • J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
    • C9 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments
    • D01 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:trf:wpaper:361. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tamilla Benkelberg (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.