We present evidence from a firm level experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial compensation from fixed wages to performance pay based on the average productivity of lower-tier workers. Theory suggests that managerial incentives affect both the mean and dispersion of...

We study optimal incentive contracts offered to teams where team members feel a social pressure to exert similar effort levels. The team consists of two groups of agents differing in their productivity. We characterize first best and the equilibrium under agency. Regarding economic incentives,...

Organizations fail due to incentive problems (agents do not want to act in the organization's interests) and bounded rationality problems (agents do not have the necessary information to do so). This survey uses recent advances in organizational economics to illuminate organizational failures...

This paper shows that bonus contracts may arise endogenously as a response to agency problems within banks, and analyzes how compensation schemes change in reaction to anticipated bail-outs. If there is a risk-shifting problem, bail-out expectations lead to steeper bonus schemes and even more...

A substantial body of research investigates the design of incentives in firms, yet less is known about incentives in organizations that hire individuals to perform tasks with positive social spillovers. We conduct a field experiment in which agents hired by a public health organization are...

Many organizations rely on teamwork, and yet field evidence on the impacts of team-based incentives remains scarce. Compared to individual incentives, team incentives can affect productivity by changing both workers’ effort and team composition. We present evidence from a field experiment...

This paper studies the effect of competition on executive compensation. We estimate the effect of increased product market competition on the performance-pay sensitivity of CEOs, and contrast it with the effect for department managers and other workers in the corporation. We use a recent reform...

We provide empirical evidence on the positive effect of non-executive employee stock options on corporate innovation. The positive effect is more pronounced when employees are more important for innovation, when free-riding among employees is weaker, when options are granted broadly to most...

This study shows that standard regressions estimated to measure a trade-off between wages and health insurance are misspecified by insufficiently accounting for establishment and firm size; an interactive, size-corrected specification is more likely to reveal a trade-off. Furthermore, because...

Social incentives like employee awards are widespread in the corporate sector and may be important instruments for solving agency problems. To date, we have little understanding of their effect on behavior. Unique panel data from the call center of a Fortune 500 financial services provider allow...