Agenda

09 Oct 2026 12:15

Ben Golub (Northwestern University)

Meeting Room 1, San Giobbe Economics Campus

 

Ben Golub (Northwestern University) - Incentive Design with Spillovers (with Krishna Dasaratha and Anant Shah)
 

Abstract:

 A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging methods from network games. The main results characterize the optimal allocation of incentive pay across agents and outcomes. Incentive optimality requires equalizing, across agents, a product of (i) individual productivity, (ii) organizational centrality, and (iii) responsiveness to monetary incentives. We specialize the model to explore several applied questions, including whether compensation should reward individual ability or collaborativeness and how the strength of complementarities shapes pay dispersion.

Language

The event will be held in English

Organized by

Department of Economics (EcSeminars)

Search in the agenda