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...

Empirically, compensation systems generate substantial effort despite weak monetary incentives. We consider reciprocal motivations as a source of incentives. We solve for the optimal contract in the basic principal-agent problem and show that reciprocal motivations and explicit performance-based...

We conduct a field experiment where we vary both the presence of a gift exchange wage and the effect of the worker's effort on the manager's payoff. The results indicate a strong complementarity between the initial wage gift and the agent's ability to "repay the gift". We collect information on...

Incentive schemes affect performance and priorities of agents but, in reality, they can be complicated even for simple tasks. We analyze the effects of the salience of incentives in a team production setting where the principal has an interest in quantity and quality of output. We use data from...

Incentive schemes affect performance and priorities of agents but, in reality, they can be complicated even for simple tasks. We analyze the effects of the salience of incentives in a team production setting where the principal has an interest in quantity and quality of output. We use data from...