Consider an agent who can costlessly add mean-preserving noise to his output. To deter such risk-taking, the principal optimally offers a contract that makes the agent's utility concave in output. If the agent is risk-neutral and protected by limited liability, this concavity constraint binds...

Setting targets and providing monetary incentives are two widely used motivating tools to achieve desirable organizational outcomes. We focus on reduction of carbon emissions as a setting in which to examine how target difficulty and monetary incentives provided to managers affect the degree of...

Complementarity between performance pay and other organizational design elements has been argued to be one potential explanation for stark differences in the observed productivity gains from performance pay adoption. Using detailed data on internal organization for a nationally representative...

This study addresses the relationship between incentive compensation and complex outsourcing in somewhat different vein. The agency theory suggests, firstly that managers are constantly faced with allocation of efforts and choices and within this context their decisions are driven by incentive...

We develop a model of relational contracts with moral hazard and asymmetric persistent information about an employee's type. We find that the form of the optimal contract depends on the job characteristics and the distribution of employees' talent. Bonus contracts are more likely to be adopted...

In a field experiment with a retail chain (1,300 employees, 193 shops), randomly selected sales teams received a bonus. The bonus increases both sales and number of customers dealt with by 3%. Each dollar spent on the bonus generates $3.80 in sales, and $2.10 in profit. Wages increase by 2.2%...

Recent advances in IT and data science give firms more flexibility to process, store and communicate the growing volume and variety of performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. In this paper, we study the impact of this cost and flexibility on employee monitoring and the internal...

In a real-effort experiment, we investigate how the timing of discretionary bonuses affects the relationship between workers and managers. Average output is substantially higher if bonuses are paid in the middle rather than upfront or at the end, as workers increase first-period output to signal...

We present evidence on social incentives in the workplace, namely on whether workers' behavior is affected by the presence of those they are socially tied to, even in settings where there are no externalities among workers due to either the production technology or the compensation scheme in...

Employers structure pay and employment relationships to mitigate agency problems. A large literature in economics documents how the resolution of these problems shapes personnel policies and labor markets. For the most part, the study of agency in employment relationships relies on highly...