Learning by Choosing: Career Concerns with Observable Actions
研究了不完全契约下工人选择任务时的效率问题，发现短期契约能实现最优结果，解释了晋升后工资跳升现象，并指出任务选择不可契约时会产生效率损失。
This paper explores potential inefficiencies of incomplete contracts in a dynamic career concerns context. In a firm-worker relationship, the worker performs public tasks that have trade-offs between productivity and informativeness. We show that the first-best outcome can be obtained with short-term contracts if the wage can depend on the task choice. This provides an explanation for wage jumps at promotions—the worker is assigned the more productive but less informative task after promotion. If task choice is not contractible, then inefficiency arises: the worker has an endogenous bias toward informativeness, while the firm is biased toward productivity.