theory, we find that a more convex prize spread increases performance in the second round at the expense of first …-round performance, although the magnitude of these effects is small. Moreover, the treatment effect is significantly larger for stores … that historically have relatively stable performance as compared to stores with more noisy performance …

performance pay. Employees in the randomly selected treatment stores could win a bonus by outperforming three comparable stores … from the control group over the course of four weeks. Treatment stores received weekly feedback on relative performance …. Control stores were kept unaware of their involvement, so that their performance generates exogenous variation in the relative …

unannounced, public recognition on employee performance. We hired more than 300 employees to work on a three-hour data-entry task … recognition increases subsequent performance substantially, and particularly so when recognition is exclusively provided to the … best performers. Remarkably, workers who did not receive recognition are mainly responsible for this performance increase …