Our objective in this paper is to illustrate and better understand the unavoidable arbitrage between incentives and flexibility in contexts of asymmetric information and to characterize the general features of an appropriate response to this challenge. We show that procedures and institutions in...

The analysis of organizational change and particularly of its impacts on incentives is neither simple nor easy. We consider here four contexts (choosing a level of decentralization, choosing the level of responsibility for pollution damage, choosing a level of technological or organisational...

We consider the cost of providing incentives through tournaments when workers are inequity averse and performance evaluation is costly. The principal never benefits from empathy between the workers, but he may benefit from their propensity for envy depending on the costs of assessing...

Data from a field experiment are used to estimate the gain in productivity that is realized when workers are paid piece rates rather than fixed wages. The experiment was conducted within a tree-planting firm and provides daily observations on individual worker productivity under both copensation...

We compare the wage costs of providing incentives through group versus individual bonus schemes. When workers are envious, either scheme may be the least cost one owing to the trade-off between the dissatisfaction with the prospect of unequal pay and the incentives it generates Nous comparons...

The role of field experiments in evaluating the effect of compensation policies on worker productivity is considered. Particular attention is paid to the ability of a field experiment to identify the effect of a permanent change in firm policy. While field experiments solve endogeneity problems...

The0501n objective of this article is to provide a survey of the empirical work done on the use of incentive pay in the United States focusing on two0501n empirical questions: what are the determinants of their use and what are the effects of pay-per-performance schemes, if any. Theoretical...

Three dimensions characterize a management control system: the nature of the involvement of operational managers, the degree of customization of the underlying tools and the relationship with the compensation policy. This characterization further formalizes the distinction between diagnostic and...