This paper studies a particular kind of gaming responses to explicit incentives in a large government organization. The gaming responses we consider occur when agents strategically report their performance outcomes to maximize their awards. An important contribution of this work is to examine...

A large number of brokers and scalpers resell a significant fraction of event tickets at substantial markups and they manage to do so despite the fact that promoters and ticketing agencies do not support resell for profits and often attempt to block secondary market. Why can't promoters capture...

Organizations often face the challenge of communicating their strategies to local decision makers. The difficulty presents itself in finding a way to measure performance wich meaningfully conveys how to implement the organization's strategy at local levels. I show that organizations solve this...

We present a model of timing of seasonal sales in which stores choose several designs before the season without knowing which, if any, is fashionable. Stores begin by charging high prices to capture the fashion market. As the season approaches the end with goods still unsold, stores have sales...

We model the sorting of medical students across medical occupations and identify a mechanism that explains the possibility of differential productivity across occupations. The model combines moral hazard and matching of physicians and occupations with pre-matching investments. In equilibrium...

We study price discrimination where consumers know at the time of contracting only the distribution of their valuations but subsequently learn their actual valuations. Consumers are sequentially screened, as in a menu of refund contracts. Initial valuation uncertainty can differ in terms of...

Despite the broad interest in performance measurement during the past 20 years, few state and local governments actually use performance measures as a management tool. A possible reason for this puzzle is that performance measurement systems are difficult to successfully implement. In this paper...

This paper studies a particular kind of gaming responses to explicit incentives in a large government organization. The gaming responses we consider occur when agents strategically report their performance outcomes to maximize their awards. An important contribution of this work is to examine...

We present a model of how organizations manage performance measures when gaming is revealed over time. The incentive designer does not know when it selects a performance measure whether it will communicate the right behavior. Only over time does the principal find out the agent's responses and...

An important lesson from the incentive literature is that explicit incentives may elicit dysfunctional and unintended responses, also known as gaming responses. The existence of these responses, however, is difficult to demonstrate in practice because this behavior is typically hidden from the...