This paper reports the results from a controlled field experiment designed to investigate the causal effect of public recognition on employee performance. We hired more than 300 employees to work on a three-hour data-entry task. In a random sample of work groups, workers unexpectedly received...

This paper makes use of two field experiments to explore individual effort responses to gifts. We extend the literature by looking at nonfinancial gifts and gifts that combine financial and nonfinancial elements with or without adding a “personal touch.” We find that non-pecuniary gifts that...

This paper reports the results from a large-scale laboratory experiment investigating the impact of tournament incentives and wage gifts on creativity. We find that tournaments substantially increase creative output, with no evidence for crowding out of intrinsic motivation. By comparison, wage...

The literature on social preferences provides overwhelming evidence of departures from pure self-interest of individuals. Experiments show that people care about others’ well-being and their relative standing. This paper investigates whether this type of behavior persists when risk comes into...

Economic theory suggests that performance pay may serve as an effective screening device to attract productive agents. The existing evidence on the self-selection of agents is largely limited to job tasks where performance is driven by routine, well-defined procedures. This study presents...

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...

We manipulate workers’ perceived meaning of a job in a field experiment. Half of the workers are informed that their job is important, the other half are told that their job is of no relevance. Results show that workers exert more effort when meaning is high, corroborating previous findings on...

We study the effects of a field experiment designed to motivate employee ideas, at a large technology company. Employees were encouraged to submit ideas on process and product improvements via an online system. In the experiment, the company randomized 19 account teams into treatment and control...

Decades of research on behavioral economics have established the importance of factors that are typically absent from the standard economic framework: reference dependent preferences, hyperbolic preferences, and the value placed on non-financial rewards. To date, these insights have had little...