Yonghang JI
Job Market Paper
Abstract: We study a manager's repeated assignment of a burden among a group of homogeneous workers under imperfect public monitoring of workers' effort. Their effort incentives are interdependent because assignment is exclusive. We develop recursive bounds on workers' assignment frequencies to address this interdependence and characterize the manager's optimum among equilibria inducing effort whenever assignment occurs. We also explicitly construct an equilibrium attaining this optimum. Whenever some effortful assignment is sustainable, this equilibrium retains the assignee after failure and relieves him after success until each other worker has produced a success and a vacancy phase has elapsed. Our results extend to assignment of a desirable task.