Limited intertemporal commitment and job design

The paper shows that some of the guidelines for job design that emerge from a static analysis of the multitask agency problem can be overturned in a dynamic model with limited commitment. Static analyses have shown that it is optimal to assign workers sole responsibility for tasks, and to allocate them tasks which are as homogeneous as possible with respect to the ease of measuring performance. Our dynamic analysis demonstrates that it can, instead, be optimal to make workers jointly responsible for tasks, and to make their task portfolios as similar to one another, but as internally diverse, as possible.