In experimental games, task-related incentives are payments to experimental subjects that vary according to their strategy choices and the consequent outcomes of the games. Limited evidence exists regarding incentive magnitude effects in experimental games. We examined one-off strategy choices...

Principal-agent problems are pervasive in economic settings. CEOs and shareholders, lawyers and clients, manufacturers and retailers, lenders and borrowers are all examples of settings in which moral hazard problems might arise. Incentive contracts in both individual and team environments have...

We introduce the word illustration task (WIT), a novel experimental task to quantify performance in an idea generation context. Between treatments, we vary whether or not piece-rate (PR) incentives are implemented and the degree to which these incentives are aligned with the desirable outcome....

This study is directly motivated by the results of Eckartz et al (2012). Subjects exerted suprisingly high efforts irrespectively of how they were compensated. This paper discusses a number of potential explanations and then it will focus on two of them: first, subjects might exert effort simply...

We utilize a laboratory experiment to compare effort provision under optimal tournament contracts with different distributions of prizes which motivate agents to compete to be first, avoid being last, or both. We find that the combined tournament contract incorporating both incentives at the top...

Managers often use tournament incentive schemes which motivate workers to compete for the top, compete to avoid the bottom, or both. In this paper we test the effectiveness and efficiency of these incentive schemes. To do so, we utilize optimal contracts in a principal-agent setting, using a...

We utilize a laboratory experiment to compare effort provision under optimal tournament contracts with different distributions of prizes which motivate agents to compete to be first, avoid being last, or both. We find that the combined tournament contract incorporating both incentives at the top...

This paper reports the results of an experiment on incentive contracts for teams. The agents, whose efforts are complementary, are rewarded according to a sharing rule chosen by the principal. Depending on the sharing rule, the agents confront endogenous prisoner's dilemma or stag-hunt...

Not enough is known about the responsiveness of individuals, in particular those who tend to work under different incentives, to changes in marginal tax rates. We ask whether changes in marginal tax rates are less distortionary for workers engaged in a contest. To examine this potential...

This paper introduces a relative performance prize scheme to best-of-N contests. We develop a theoretical model of the best-of-N contest with intermediate prizes distributed based on the players' relative performance. The model predicts that a relative performance prize scheme both increases the...