An agent can perform a job in several ways, which we call tasks. Choosing agents’ tasks is the prerogative of management within firms, and of agents themselves if they are entrepreneurs. While agents’ comparative advantage at different tasks is unknown, it can be learned by observing their performance. However, tasks that generate more information could lead to lower short-term profits. Hence, firms will allocate workers to more informative tasks only if agents cannot easily move to other firms. When, instead, workers can easily move to other firms, agents may prefer to become entrepreneurs and acquire task discretion, even if their short-term payoff is lower than employees. Our model generates novel predictions with respect to, for example, how the wage dynamics of agents who switch between entrepreneurship and employment are affected by labor and contracting frictions. (JEL D83, J24, J62, J63, L26, M13).

中文翻译：

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任务自由裁量权、劳动力市场摩擦和创业精神

代理可以通过多种方式执行工作，我们称之为任务。选择代理人的任务是公司内部管理层的特权，如果代理人是企业家，也是代理人本身的特权。虽然代理在不同任务中的比较优势是未知的，但可以通过观察他们的表现来学习。然而，产生更多信息的任务可能会导致较低的短期利润。因此，只有当代理人不能轻易转移到其他公司时，公司才会将工人分配给信息量更大的任务。相反，当员工可以轻松地转移到其他公司时，代理人可能更愿意成为企业家并获得任务自由裁量权，即使他们的短期回报低于员工。我们的模型生成新的预测，例如，在创业和就业之间转换的代理人的工资动态如何受到劳动和合同摩擦的影响。（JEL D83、J24、J62、J63、L26、M13）。