Research Projects
Infinitely repeated games with transfers
When firms want to collude, when employers want their employees to not just work to the letter of the contract, when buyers want to ensure the performance of their suppliers, agreements are often not enforced by formal contract but by threats and promises in a repeated interation. Since in all these relationships monetary transfers are possible, my coauthor Sebastian Kranz and I systematically analyze repeated games with transfers.
"Infinitely repeated games with public monitoring and monetary transfers", 2012, with Sebastian Kranz, Journal of Economic Theory
"Discounted stochastic games with voluntary transfers", 2018, with Sebastian Kranz, Economic Theory
Agency problems and limited liability
Agency problems arise when ownership and control are separated. They occur for example when an investor funds a project of an entrepreneur with limited wealth or when shareholders delegate decision making to the managers of the firm. Contracts and legal regulation can be used to align the incentives of the agent with those of the principal. My research in this area is concerned with the following questions: Should manager liability be limited by a business judgment rule? (Engert and Goldlücke, 2016); What are optimal compensation agreements between facilities that create negative externalities and host communities, if communities have not enough funds to breach the contract in light of changed circumstances? (Goldlücke and Schmitz, 2018); How can belief-based models of self-esteem be embedded in an agency framework to model the phenomenon that employees might hide overtime work to appear high-skilled to others or to themselves, and what does this imply for legal requirements to record working time (Alasalmi, Goldlücke, Jordan 2023); Generally, what is the effect of limited liability in models with hidden information and with hidden action? (Goldlücke and Schmitz, 2012, 2018).
Incomplete contracts and renegotiation
Starting from the observation that contracts are often incomplete and will be renegotiated, how can the resulting hold-up problem be mitigated? My research considers the role of contract law, asymmetric information about outside options and repeated interactions as possible solutions.
"Investments as Signals of Outside Options'', with Patrick Schmitz, Journal of Economic Theory, 2014
"Renegotiation-proof Relational Contracts'', with Sebastian Kranz, Games and Economic Behavior, 2013
Incentives in organizations
Processes within the firm are also often governed by incentive contracts and repeated interactions. My research addresses the following questions: For efficient relational incentive contracts, should production be organized in teams or in hierarchies? Is it possible to make sense of the management wisdom "A's hire A's and B's hire C's" in a simple game-theoretic model? How does an optimal mechanism to assign an unpleasant task look like when payments cannot be used?
"The Multiple-Volunteers Principle", 2023, with Thomas Tröger, extended version
"Assigning an unpleasant task without payment", 2018, with Thomas Tröger
"Strategic recruiting in ongoing hierarchies" Economics Letters, 2017
"Delegation, Monitoring, and Relational Contracts'', with Sebastian Kranz, Economics Letters, 2012
Strategic reasoning and eye-tracking
This research is concerned with the strategy use of gaze and tries to answer the questions: "How informative are gaze patterns about choices and to what extent are subjects able to exploit this information, and how does this depend on the strategic situation?".
"Strategic Gaze: An Interactive Eye-Tracking Study", with Jan Hausfeld and Konstantin Hesler, 2018