An agent may privately learn which aspects of his job are more important by shirking on some of them, and use that information to shirk more effectively in the future. In a model of long-term employment relationship, we characterize the optimal relational contract in the presence of such learning-by-shirking and highlight how the performance measurement system can be managed to sharpen incentives. Two related policies are studied: intermittent replacement of existing measures, and adoption of new ones. In spite of the learning-by-shirking effect, the optimal contract is stationary, and may involve stochastic replacement/adoption policies that dilute the agent’s information rents from learning how to game the system.
1 Jul 2021
The Review of Economic Studies