• Media type: E-Book; Report
  • Title: The roles of incentives and voluntary cooperation for contractual compliance
  • Contributor: Gächter, Simon [Author]; Kessler, Esther [Author]; Königstein, Manfred [Author]
  • imprint: Bonn: Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), 2011
  • Language: English
  • Keywords: gift-exchange experiments ; repeated games ; implicit incentives ; principal-agent games ; C90 ; C70 ; experiments ; incomplete contracts ; separability ; explicit incentives
  • Origination:
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  • Description: Efficiency under contractual incompleteness often requires voluntary cooperation in situations where self-regarding incentives for contractual compliance are present as well. Here we provide a comprehensive experimental analysis based on the gift-exchange game of how explicit and implicit incentives affect cooperation. We first show that there is substantial cooperation under non-incentive compatible contracts. Incentive-compatible contracts induce best-reply effort and crowd out any voluntary cooperation. Further experiments show that this result is robust to two important variables: experiencing Trust contracts without any incentives and implicit incentives coming from repeated interaction. Implicit incentives have a strong positive effect on effort only under non-incentive compatible contracts.
  • Access State: Open Access