The core role of managerial accounting is to provide information to facilitate managers' decisions and influence their behavior through incentives. We study the impact of these two roles of information on profits by implementing a field experiment in a large retail chain. In a 2 × 2 factorial...

Most Principal-Agent models predict that increasing incentives result in higher performance. This paper examines whether this result is valid under real-effort conditions. Exposing the participants to varying strengths of incentives we find an inversely U-shaped relationship between effort...

We examine the benefits of objective performance measurement in a field experiment conducted in a retail bank. At the outset objective performance measures of pro fits in each branch were only available on the branch level and managers allocated bonuses to their employees based on subjective...

The core role of managerial accounting is to provide information to facilitate managers' decisions and influence their behavior through incentives. We study the impact of these two roles of information on profits by implementing a field experiment in a large retail chain. In a 2 × 2 factorial...

We investigate the difference between monetary incentives and monetary gifts on employees’ performance using a firm-level field experiment. We randomly assign store managers of a German discount supermarket chain to two different groups. In the first treatment, the store managers receive a...

We study the profit effects and interplay of two core accounting practices in a field experiment in a large retail chain. In a 2 × 2 factorial design, we vary (i) whether store managers obtain decision-facilitating information on a profit metric and (ii) whether they receive performance pay...