Recent studies report that productivity increases under tournament reward structures than under piece rate reward structures. We conduct maze-solving experiments under both reward structures and reveal that overconfidence is a significant factor in increasing productivity. Specifically, subjects...

We explore the behavior of losers of promotion tournaments after the tournament is concluded. We do so through the use of an experiment in which we vary the design of the promotion tournament to determine how tournament design affects post tournament effort. We provide a theoretical model...

We develop and test experimentally the argument that gender/family and/or professional identities, activated through psychological priming, may influence preference for competition. We focus on female professionals for whom these identities may conflict and male professionals for whom they may...

Management meted out punishment to enforce rules and encourage adherence. However, the effectiveness depended on how the employees perceive and interpret the policy. Therefore, it was uncertain how to best achieve the target. The paper tested employees’ behavioral responses in two conditions,...

Women are often less willing than men to compete, even in tasks where there is no gender gap in performance. Also, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful and previous research has documented that men and women sometimes react differently to acute stressors. We use two...

Since many key career events, such as exams and interviews, involve competition and stress, gender differences in response to these factors could help to explain the labor-market gender gap. In a laboratory experiment, we manipulate psychosocial stress using the Trier Social Stress Test, and...

Despite the prevalence of non-routine analytical team tasks in modern economies, little is known about how incentives influence performance in these tasks. In a field experiment with more than 3000 participants, we document a positive effect of bonus incentives on the probability of completion...

Recent studies report that productivity increases under tournament reward structures than under piece rate reward structures. We conduct maze-solving experiments under both reward structures and reveal that overconfidence is a significant factor in increasing productivity. Specifically, subjects...

This paper uses a series of experiments with commercial bank loan officers to test the effect of performance incentives on risk-assessment and lending decisions. We first show that, while high-powered incentives lead to greater screening effort and more profitable lending, their power is muted...

This study uses a laboratory experiment to analyze the effectiveness of performance based monetary incentives in the teaching process. The process of knowledge transmission is recreated using a video-stream. Four different teacher payment schemes are compared, three of which depend on the...