Awards : Tangibility, Self-Signaling and Signaling to Others

Awards are widely used as incentives in organizations. This paper situates awards in the broader incentives landscape and shows how the motivational value of awards can be understood with a parsimonious theoretical framework that considers three sources of value: the tangible component of an award, the social signals it emits, and its self-signaling function. Synthesizing across different literatures, we identify and discuss several major characteristics of award schemes through the lenses of these three dimensions: the audience, scarcity, the giver's status, and the selection process. Based on our theoretical framework, we integrate and code the awards literature published in top economics and management journals to elucidate what has been learned, and what remains to be studied. Our framework offers a roadmap for future research and proposes three questions that are at the frontier in the study of awards and incentives