Tournaments are often used to improve performance in innovation contexts. Tournaments provide monetary incentives but also render teams’ identity and social-image concerns salient. We study the effects of tournaments on team performance in a non-routine task and identify the importance of...

Tournaments are often used to improve performance in innovation contexts. Tournaments provide monetary incentives but also render teams' identity and image concerns salient. We study the effects of tournaments on team performance in a non-routine task and identify the importance of these...

Despite the prevalence of non-routine analytical team tasks in modern economies, little is understood regarding how incentives influence performance in these tasks. In a series of field experiments involving more than 5,000 participants, we investigate how incentives alter behavior in teams...

High-performance work systems give workers more discretion, thereby increasing effort productivity but also shirking opportunities. We show experimentally that screening for work attitude and labor market competition are causal determinants of the viability of high-performance work systems, and...

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to...

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These "high-performance work systems" are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show...