Civil servants have a bad reputation of being lazy. However, citizens' personal experiences with civil servants appear to be significantly better. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive contracts...

This paper develops a model in which workers are heterogeneous in their intrinsic motivation to work at a firm. We characterise optimal incentive schemes and examine how the firm can attract and select highly motivated workers to fill a vacancy when workers’ motivation is private information....

The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial and non-managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a...

We ran a field experiment in a Dutch retail chain consisting of 128 stores. In a random sample of these stores, we introduced short-term sales competitions among subsets of stores. We find that sales competitions have a large effect on sales growth, but only in stores where the store's manager...