The literature has shown that the overall efficiency of exogenously imposed tournaments is reduced by a high variance in performance. This paper reports results from an experiment analyzing whether allowing subjects to self-select into different payment schemes is reducing the variability of...

The provision of social incentives in the workplace, where performance benefits a charitable cause, has been frequently used in modern organizations. In this paper, we quantify the impact of social incentives on performance under two incentive schemes: piece rate and a winner-take-all...

What happens when a firm switches from paying hourly wages to paying piece rates? The theory developed below predicts that average productivity rises, that the firm will attract a more able work force and that the variance in output across individuals at the firm will rise as well. The theory is...