We develop a simple model of the effects of reputation on wine prices. An increasing fraction of consumers who are quot;naivequot; (less well informed about wine quality) results in a stronger sensitivity of wine prices to ratings of quality. We then use data on prices and Robert Parker's...

This paper studies the intraday relationship between ultra-fast machine-driven activity (UFA) and market quality in automated equity markets. We find that higher UFA is associated with lower intraday market quality (greater quoted and effective spreads and lower depth). This effect is...

Variations in overall liquidity can be measured by simultaneous changes in both immediacy costs and depth. Liquidity changes, however, are ambiguous whenever both liquidity dimensions do not reinforce each other. In this paper, we characterize ambiguity using an instantaneous time-varying...

Personnel records are used to examine compensation, recruitment, and retention of a group of very highly skilled workers: civilian scientists and engineers in U.S. Department of Defense laboratories. In contrast to the private sector, returns to skills were largely flat for this group from...

A large, mature and robust economic literature on pay for performance now exists, which provides a useful framework for thinking about pay for performance systems. I use the lessons of the literature to discuss how to design and implement pay for performance in practice. -- incentives ; pay for...

The information technology revolution has had dramatic effects on jobs and the labor market. Many routine and manual tasks have been automated, replacing workers. By contrast, new technologies complement non-routine, cognitive, and social tasks, making work in such tasks more productive. These...

At the 2016 Academy of Management Conference, a group of distinguished compensation researchers held a panel discussion on the future of compensation research. Their remarks were compiled into an article published in this issue. Soon after the panel, Charles Fay commissioned a similar discussion...

According to psychologists and neuroscientists, a key source of intrinsic motivation is learning. An economic model of this is presented. Learning may make work less onerous, or the employee may value it in and of itself. Multitasking generates learning: performing one task increases...

This paper analyses the causes of managerial change and the impact of different reforms on firm performance, using survey data from 300 Ukrainian firms. The main findings are: 1) ownership and competition are linked to managerial change: de novo firms but also privatised firms experienced less...

In this paper we study job design. Will an organization plan precisely how the job is to be done ex ante, or ask workers to determine the process as they go? We first model this decision and predict complementarity between these job attributes: multitasking, discretion, skills, and...