IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/sfb373/199943.html

Long-term work contracts versus sequential spot markets: Experimental evidence on firm-specific investment

Author

Listed:
  • Anderhub, Vital
  • Königstein, Manfred
  • Kübler, Dorothea

Abstract

Dismissal rules, i.e. legally enforced long term contracts, have beem defended against criticism for, among other things, providing efficient incentives to invest in relationship specific skills. However, in many situations efficient investment can also be attained by spot contracts. We replicate such a situation with our experimental design based on a simple two period game, involving the choke of the contract; length by the principal and an investment choke by the agent. In contrast to the game theoretic predictions, we find that investment of the worker and length of contract; are strictly positively correlated. We interpret our finding as an indication for a perceived market risk due to other players' actions although the model is fully deterministic. This could imply a behaviorally relevant difference between contract and market administered incentives.

Suggested Citation

  • Anderhub, Vital & Königstein, Manfred & Kübler, Dorothea, 1999. "Long-term work contracts versus sequential spot markets: Experimental evidence on firm-specific investment," SFB 373 Discussion Papers 1999,43, Humboldt University of Berlin, Interdisciplinary Research Project 373: Quantification and Simulation of Economic Processes.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:sfb373:199943
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/61761/1/722276982.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. Angelova, Vera & Güth, Werner & Kocher, Martin G., 2012. "Co-employment of permanently and temporarily employed agents," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(1), pages 48-58.
    2. Christian Grund & Christine Harbring & Kirsten Thommes & Katja Rebecca Tilkes, 2020. "Decisions on Extending Group Membership—Evidence from a Public Good Experiment," Games, MDPI, vol. 11(4), pages 1-27, December.
    3. Dennis A.V. Dittrich, 2004. "Wages, Length of Relationship and Bargaining Power: An experimental study in a world of complete contracts," Papers on Strategic Interaction 2004-18, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic Interaction Group.
    4. 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.
    5. Mathias Erlei & J. Philipp Siemer, 2014. "Endogenous Property Rights in a Hold-up Experiment," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 65(2), pages 237-270, May.
    6. Bernhard Ganglmair, 2008. "Breakup of Repeat Transaction Contracts, Specific Investment, and Efficient Rent-Seeking," JEPS Working Papers 08-001, JEPS.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • J41 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Labor Contracts
    • J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search

    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:zbw:sfb373:199943. 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: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfhubde.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.