We study how peers impact worker productivity growth among salespeople in the cosmetics department of a department store. We first exploit a shift assignment policy that creates exogenous variation in salespersons' peers each week to identify and quantify sources of worker learning. We find that...

This paper examines how compensation systems impact peer effects and competition in collocated sales teams. We use department store sales data to show that compensation systems influence worker incentives to help and compete with peers within and across firms, which in turn changes how coworker...

When salespeople who are heterogeneous in abilities are assigned into teams, how do they adjust effort as the abilities of their coworkers change? Economic theory predicts that when salespeople compete with each other, the lower-ability salesperson strategically decreases effort as the ability...