Conventional wisdom suggests that an increase in monetary incentives should induce agents to exert higher effort. In this paper, however, we demonstrate that this may not hold in team settings. In the context of sequential team production with positive externalities between agents, incentive...

We derive a natural definition of responsibility in a formal model where employees care for their career prospects: A superior holds a subordinate responsible for a task, when she announced her beliefs that this subordinate contributes most to this task. We show, that those announced beliefs...

Conventional wisdom suggests that an increase in monetary incentives should induce agents to exert higher effort. In this paper, however, we demonstrate that this may not hold in team settings. In the context of sequential team production with positive externalities between agents, incentive...

We derive a natural definition of responsibility in a formal model where employees care for their career prospects: A superior holds a subordinate responsible for a task, when she announces her beliefs that this subordinate contributes most to this task. We show, that those announced beliefs...

We analyze a two-task work environment with risk-neutral but inequality averse individuals. For the agent employed in task 2 effort is verifiable, while in task 1 it is not. Accordingly, agent 1 receives an incentive contract which, due to his wealth constraint, leads to a rent that the other...

This study uses panel data describing about 6,500 employees in a large international companyto study the incentive effects of performance related pay. The company uses two performancerelated remuneration mechanisms. One is an individual "surprise" bonus payment. The other isa more structured...

The relationship between executive pay and corporate financial performance con-tinues to attract wide academic, media and policy attention. The very high salariesenjoyed by senior executives in corporations primarily in the North American coun-tries are often contrasted with the relatively low...

We derive a natural definition of responsibility in a formal model where employees care for their career prospects: A superior holds a subordinate responsible for a task, when she announces her beliefs that this subordinate contributes most to this task. We show, that those announced beliefs...

We study optimal contracts in a simple model where employees are averse to inequity as modelled by Fehr and Schmidt (1999). A "selfish" employer can profitably exploit such preferences among its employees by offering contracts which create inequity off-equilibrium and thus, they would leave...

I analyze the impact of managerial involvement and the allocation of authority on employee initiative in a setting where both a manager and an employee can originate new ideas for implementation. I show that employee initiative is maximized through the combination of formal authority and limited...