The paper investigates the effect of four differently framed payment contracts on the agent's effort provision and performance in a real effort experiment. The four incentive payments are framed as a base wage and bonuses (one immediately pays bonuses, the other only after an initial...

We provide a hidden-action principal-agent model where the agent has referencedependent preferences. The loss-averse agent considers the base wage as reference point, and bonuses and/or penalties as gains and losses, respectively. When choosing optimal payments, the principal strategically sets...