In this study, we examine two adjudication methods designed to resolve disputes between principals and agents concerning bonus payments in relationships characterized by moral hazard and where the parties have been forced to use soft, imprecise, and subjective information to align incentives....

There is much disagreement about the extent to which financial incentives motivate study participants. We elicit preferences for being paid for completing a survey, including a one-in-twenty chance of winning a $100 electronic gift card, a guaranteed electronic gift card with the same expected...

There is much disagreement about the extent to which financial incentives motivate study participants. We elicit preferences for being paid for completing a survey, including a one-intwenty chance of winning a $100 electronic gift card, a guaranteed electronic gift card with the same expected...

Peer evaluation tournaments are common in academia, the arts, and corporate environments. They make use of the expert knowledge that academics or team members have in assessing their peers’ performance. However, rampant opportunities for cheating may throw a wrench in the process unless,...

We study a situation where physicians differing in their degree of altruism exert a diagnostic effort before deciding whether to test patients to determine the most appropriate treatment. The diagnostic effort generates an imperfect private signal of the patient’s type, while the test is...

We conduct a field experiment studying how financial incentives for achieving specific course grades affect university students, whether effects vary by ability, and whether allowing students to choose their goals improves outcomes. We find that incentives negatively affect performance,...

How does information transmission change when it requires attracting the attention of receivers? This paper combines an experiment that varies freelance professionals’ incentives to attract attention about scientific findings, with several online experiments that exogenously expose receivers...

We evaluate a firm’s unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out of the firm’s "Discover Your Purpose" intervention among 2,976 white-collar employees...

Performance pay has been shown to have important implications for worker and firm productivity. Although workers' skills may directly matter for the cost of effort to reach performance goals, surprisingly little is know about the heterogeneity in the effects of incentive pay across workers. In...

Questions about market power have become salient in macroeconomics. We consider the role of institutional structures in addressing these within a dynamic general equilibrium framework. Standard models account for monopoly profits as a lump-sum transfer to the representative agent. We label this...

In the digital service supply chain, digital service providers undertake the marketing platform development programs with satisfying digital service quality (DSQ) to help traditional retail enterprises (TREs) achieve digital technologies and merchandizing innovation. To illustrate the influence...

Using a large-scale real effort experiment, we explore whether and how different peer assignment mechanisms affect worker performance and stress. Letting individuals choose whom to compare to increases productivity to the same extent as a targeted exogenous matching policy designed to maximize...

Background. In hospitals, decisions are often made under time pressure. There is, however, little evidence on how time pressure affects the quality of treatment and the documentation behavior of physicians. Setting. We implemented a controlled laboratory experiment with a healthcare framing in...

With growing public and policy-makers' attention to en vironmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosures, a natural question is how management compensation systems should include ESG metrics. This paper selectively reviews and discusses insights from agency theory on the design of optimal...

We consider the contracting problem between a firm and a manager. The manager provides productive efforts to increase the firm's financial performance and to reduce its carbon emissions. The outcome of these efforts depends on the manager's 'green' ability. The manager is interested in the...

Millennials and Gen Z now dominate the global workforce, each with distinct reward preferences influencing motivation and creativity. Understanding these distinctions is critical for improving employee retention and performance. This research aims to evaluate the efficacy of intrinsic and...

In this study, we focus on managerial incentives provided by debt-like compensation and further investigate whether and to what extent such managerial incentives may affect CEOs' decisions on risk management. Building on cumulative prospect theory and instrumental stakeholder theory, we propose...

We consider a framework in which both a principal and an agent care about a social mission, such as addressing social or environmental concerns. The agent requires financing and must satisfy a budget constraint. Under incomplete information, in addition to the usual quantity distortions for...

How do different characteristics of pay-for-performance schemes affect fairness perceptions? In two studies, we systematically consider three major classes of incentive schemes: continuous piece rate incentives, discrete bonus schemes, and tournament incentives. We find that pay inequality has a...

For workers facing uncertain output, fixed-wage contracts provide implicit insurance compared to self-employment or performance-based pay. But like any insurance product, these contracts are prone to market distortions through moral hazard and adverse selection. Using a model of wage contracts...

We conduct an online donation dictator game experiment with over 1,300 participants, representative of the Japanese population, to investigate the relationship between the incentive scheme and prosocial behavior by systematically varying the stake size and probability of being paid, including...