While studies on individual-based and collective payment schemes are largely unconnected, there appears to be a widely held belief that individual-based schemes have a stronger influence on firm performance than collective ones. This also applies to an index of best management practices...

While studies on individual-based and collective payment schemes are largely unconnected, there appears to be a widely held belief that individual-based schemes have a stronger influence on firm performance than collective ones. This also applies to an index of best management practices...

Working from home reduces real-time visibility of employees within the physical space of the workplace. This makes it difficult to monitor employees' work behavior. Employers may instead monitor employees' outputs and provide incentives through performance pay. The crucial question is what type...

Working from home reduces real-time visibility of employees within the physical space of the workplace. This makes it difficult to monitor employees' work behavior. Employers may instead monitor employees' outputs and provide incentives through performance pay. The crucial question is what type...

Despite claims that CEO compensation contracts are increasingly complex, little is known about the extent to which they are, what drives that complexity, and its implications. We develop a new measure of compensation contract complexity and find that complexity relates to factors capturing firm...

This paper examines multi-period compensation contracts when retirement is anticipated. Short-term contracts in long-term employment relationships are equivalent to a long-term renegotiation-proof contract. The dynamic of incentive rates is determined by (i) how and in which periods managerial...

A basic tenet of incentive theory states that there is a trade-off between risk and incentives. By implication, greater variation in firm profits leads to a reduction in the use of profit sharing. Surprisingly, there is little empirical evidence for this relationship. This paper reexamines the...

Performance related pay is a solution to an incentive problem. Theory suggests that performance related pay is optimal when inputs are unobservable and employees would otherwise lack incentives to provide effort. When labour inputs are observable, the optimal contract does not make pay...

This paper explores intermediary agency problems, specifically the use and misuse of authority and incentives in organizational hierarchies. Through a principal-supervisor-agent model inspired by sales settings, I propose organizations delegate authority over salespeople to frontline sales...

Shared bonus pools, in which a worker’s bonus depends both on a worker’s share of the pool (which serves as the incentive) and on the size of the pool (which is largely outside of the worker’s control), are a common method for distributing bonus pay. Using variation in the size of the...