We study the effects of a field experiment designed to motivate employee ideas, at a large technology company. Employees were encouraged to submit ideas on process and product improvements via an online system. In the experiment, the company randomized 19 account teams into treatment and control...

At the 2016 Academy of Management Conference, a group of distinguished compensation researchers held a panel discussion on the future of compensation research. Their remarks were compiled into an article published in this issue. Soon after the panel, Charles Fay commissioned a similar discussion...

According to psychologists and neuroscientists, a key source of intrinsic motivation is learning. An economic model of this is presented. Learning may make work less onerous, or the employee may value it in and of itself. Multitasking generates learning: performing one task increases...

According to psychologists and neuroscientists, a key source of intrinsic motivation is learning. An economic model of this is presented. Learning may make work less onerous, or the employee may value it in and of itself. Multitasking generates learning: performing one task increases...

Social incentives like employee awards are widespread in the corporate sector and may be important instruments for solving agency problems. To date, we have little understanding of their effect on behavior. Unique panel data from the call center of a Fortune 500 financial services provider allow...

Decades of research on behavioral economics have established the importance of factors that are typically absent from the standard economic framework: reference dependent preferences, hyperbolic preferences, and the value placed on non-financial rewards. To date, these insights have had little...

Die Ökonomik der Kriminalität und die darauf aufbauende Ökonomik der Sicherheit konzentrieren sich vorwiegend auf Strafen als Mittel der Politik. Dies ist aus verschiedenen Gründen unklug. Zum einen gibt es eine Reihe von Bedingungen, unter denen Bestrafung nicht wirkt oder die Zahl der...

Behavioral economics documents the importance of status and self-image concerns in the workplace, but is largely silent about how to instrumentalize them to induce effort. Awards

Awards - widespread in the corporate sector and elsewhere - are motivators that derive their value from non-pecuniary concerns such as status and self-image. Quasi-experimental panel data from the call center of a large international bank allow us to estimate the causal impact on effort when...

This paper reports the findings from a survey experiment conducted online at IBM to assess the impact of employee awards on behavior in the workplace. We document that the introduction of a hypothetical award has statistically significant effects on the stated willingness to contribute to a...