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We study optimal non-linear contracts offered by two firms competing for the exclusive services of workers, who are privately informed about their ability and motivation. Firms differ in their organizational form, and motivated workers are keen to be hired by the non-profit firm because they adhere to its mission. If the for-profit firm has a competitive advantage over the non-profit firm, the latter attracts fewer high-ability workers with respect to the former. Moreover, workers exert more effort at the for-profit than at the non-profit firm despite the latter distorts effort levels upwards. Finally, a wage penalty emerges for non-profit workers which is partly due to compensating effects (labor donations by motivated workers) and partly due to the negative selection of ability into the non-profit firm. The opposite results hold when it is the non-profit firm that has a competitive advantage.

We study optimal contracts offered by two firms competing for the exclusive services of one worker, who is privately informed about her ability and her motivation. Firms differ both in their production technology and in the mission they pursue and a motivated worker is keen to be hired by the mission-oriented firm. We find that the matching of worker types to firms is always Pareto-efficient. When the difference in firms' technology is high, only the most efficient firm is active. When the difference is not very high, then agent types sort themselves by motivation: the mission-oriented firm hires motivated types and the profit-oriented firm employs non-motivated ones, independently of ability. Effort provision is higher when the worker is hired by the mission-oriented firm, but a compensating wage differential might exist: the motivated worker is paid less by the mission-oriented firm. Such an earnings penalty is driven entirely by motivation, is increasing in ability and is associated to low power of incentives.

We study the screening problem of a firm that needs to hire a worker to produce output and that observes neither the productive ability nor the intrinsic motivation of the job applicant. We completely characterize the set of optimal contracts according to whether motivation or ability is the main determinant of the worker's performance. We show that it is always in the firm's interest to hire all types of worker and to offer different contracts to different types of employees. Interestingly, when motivation is very high, incentives force the firm to pay higher informational rents, to increase effort distorsions for motivated workers, and to offer a strictly positive wage to workers enjoying a positive utility from effort provision, who thus become paid volunteers. These results suggest that, from the principal's viewpoint, very high motivation might not be a desirable worker's characteristic.

Trabajo publicado como artículo en Review of Economic Design 15(2):91-120(2009).-- http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10058-009-0093-8 ; We consider the collective incentives of buyers and sellers to form cartels in markets where trade is realized through decentralized pairwise bargaining. Cartels are coalitions of buyers or sellers that limit market participation and compensate inactive members for abstaining from trade. In a stable market outcome, cartels set Nash equilibrium quantities and cartel memberships are immune to defections. We prove that the set of stable market outcomes is non-empty and we provide its full characterization. Stable market outcomes are of two types: (i) at least one cartel actively restrains trade and the levels of market participation are balanced, or (ii) only one cartel, eventually the cartel that forms on the long side of the market, is active and it reduces trade slightly below the opponent's. ; We acknowledge financial support from the Catalan Government (grants 2000BEAI200120 to Burani and 2000SGR-0054 to Ponsati) and the Spanish Ministry of Education (grants PB98-970 and PR2000-0143 to Ponsati).

We study the Lemons Problem when workers have private information on both their skills and their intrinsic motivation for the job offered by firms in the labor market. We first show that, when workers are motivated, inefficiencies due to adverse selection are mitigated. More interestingly, depending on the association between productivity and motivation, higher salaries affect the pool of candidates in three possible ways: they can attract (i) more skilled but less motivated applicants, as expected; (ii) more skilled and more motivated applicants; (iii) less skilled and less motivated applicants. The last two counterintuitive effects can only occur when a positive correlation exists between productivity and motivation. Our results are relevant in the policy debate on whether it is possible to improve the quality of workers in vocational markets by changing their wage rate and reconcile the different empirical evidence provided so far on motivated workers such as public servants, teachers, health professionals and, politicians.

We study the Lemons Problem when workers have private information on both their skills and their intrinsic motivation for the job offered by firms in the labor market. We first show that, when workers are motivated, inefficiencies due to adverse selection are mitigated. More interestingly, depending on the association between productivity and motivation, higher salaries affect the pool of candidates in three possible ways: they can attract (i) more skilled but less motivated applicants, as expected; (ii) more skilled and more motivated applicants; (iii) less skilled and less motivated applicants. The last two counterintuitive effects can only occur when a positive correlation exists between productivity and motivation. Our results are relevant in the policy debate on whether it is possible to improve the quality of workers in vocational markets by changing their wage rate and reconcile the different empirical evidence provided so far on motivated workers such as public servants, teachers, health professionals and, politicians.