Free Riding and Unequal Pay in Symmetric Teams
研究了当团队成员的努力可以完全相互替代时，委托人如何通过给相同能力的成员支付不同薪酬来缓解拖延形式的动态搭便车问题，并揭示了形成领导-追随者团队的条件。
This paper studies dynamic incentive pay in teams where agents' efforts are perfect substitutes. It shows that the principal may unequally reward identical agents to mitigate dynamic free riding in the form of procrastination. Unequal pay effectively creates a “team leader” who overworks and symmetric “followers” who underwork. Such leader-follower teams emerge if (i) agents are relatively patient or few, or (ii) the principal sufficiently cares about or is not patient for project success. These findings contrast with the recent literature (e.g., Winter 2004), pinpointing effort complementarity as the source of unequal pay in symmetric teams.