Sustaining Implicit Contracts When Agents Have Career Concerns: The Role of Information Disclosure

Abstract

Firms often combine career concerns based incentives with incentives created through relational performance contracts. In this context, disclosure of worker's productivity information enhances career concerns based incentives, but may reduce the firm's ability to sustain relational contracts. The latter effect originates as upon reneging on the relational contract the firm can continue to rely on the career concerns based incentives. Thus, stronger is this incentive the larger is the punishment payoff of the firm. I consider an environment where a long-run firm faces a sequence of short-run workers, who can subsequently get raided (poached). The disclosure policy of the firm determines how much information about the worker's productivity it will share with the potential raiders. I provide a characterization of the optimal disclosure policy. When relational contracts substitutes career concern incentives, the optimal disclosure policy follows a cut-off rule where the more patient firms always opt for opaqueness. Also, the firm never combines the two forms of incentives when they are substitutes. Both of these results need not hold if the incentives are complements. I further show that in presence of firm specific matching gains, the set of discount factor that supports transparency is increasing in the size of the matching gain.

Keywords: Implicit Contracts, Career Concerns, Disclosure

JEL Classification: M5, C73, D82