Tournaments, reward structures based on rank order, are compared with individual contracts in a model with one risk-neutral principal and many risk-averse agents. Each agent's output is a stochastic function of his effort level plus an additive shock term that is common to all the agents. The principal observes only the output levels of the agents. It is shown that, in the absence of a common shock, using optimal independent contracts dominates using the optimal tournament. Conversely, if the distribution of the common shock is sufficiently diffuse, using the optimal tournament dominates using optimal independent contracts. Finally, it is shown that for a sufficiently large number of agents, a principal who cannot observe the common shock but uses the optimal tournament does as well as one who can observe the shock and uses independent contracts.

Tournaments, reward structures based on rank order, are compared with individual contracts in a model with one risk-neutral principal and many risk-averse agents. Each agent's output is a stochastic function of his effort level plus an additive shock term that is common to all the agents. The principal observes only the output levels of the agents. It is shown that, in the absence of a common shock, using optimal independent contracts dominates using the optimal tournament. Conversely, if the distribution of the common shock is sufficiently diffuse, using the optimal tournament dominates using optimal independent contracts. Finally, it is shown that for a sufficiently large number of agents, a principal who cannot observe the common shock but uses the optimal tournament does as well as one who can observe the shock and uses independent contracts.

This paper studies the efficient agreements about the dependence of workers' earnings on employment, when the employment level is controlled by firms.The firms' .superiorinformation about profitability conditions is responsible for this form of contract governance.Under plausible assumptions, such aj^reements will cause employment to diverge from efficiency as a byproduct of their attempt to mitigate risk.ll is shown that, if leisure is a normal good and firms are risk-neutral, employment is always ahoue the efficient level.Such a one-period implicit contracting model cannot, therefore, be used to "explain" unemployment as a rational byproduct of risk sharing between workers and a risk-neutral firm under conditions of asymmetric information.