Extensive field evidence shows individuals’ decisions in settings involving choice under uncertainty (e.g. savings and investment choices) depend on the decisions of their peers. One hypothesized cause of peer group effects is social interaction effects: an individual’s utility from an...

Many incentive plans are inherently ambiguous, lacking an explicit mapping between performance and compensation. Using an online labor market, Amazon Mechanical Turk, we study the effect of ambiguity on willingness to accept contracts to do a real-effort task as well as completion and...

We augment a standard bilateral gift exchange game so employees can send messages at the same time as choosing an effort level. Employee effort (controlling for wages) is unaffected by allowing messages, but wages dramatically increase. Messages affect wages because employees give managers...

Many incentive plans are inherently ambiguous, lacking an explicit mapping between performance and compensation. Using an online labor market, Amazon Mechanical Turk, we study the effect of ambiguity on willingness to accept contracts to do a real-effort task as well as completion and...

We examine strategic interactions between firms and planners in China, comparing behavior between: (i) students and managers with field experience with this situation, (ii) standard versus increased monetary incentives, and (iii) sessions conducted "in context", making explicit reference to...

This paper studies experiments set in a corporate environment where a manager attempts to overcome a history of coordination failure by employees using either financial incentives or communication. I compare the choices of subject managers drawn from a standard undergraduate population with...