The importance of fair and equal treatment of workers is at the heart of the debate in organizational management. In this regard, we study how reward mechanisms and production technologies affect effort provision in teams. Our experimental results demonstrate that unequal rewards can potentially...

The wage policy of a German and a U.S. firm is comparatively analysed with a focus on the relation between wages and hierarchies. While prior studies examine only one particular firm, in this paper two plants of the same owners with similar production processes in different institutional...

This contribution investigates severance payments for dismissed employees in Germany. Particularly, it responds to the following questions: Who receives severance payments? By which characteristics is the level of severance payments determined? Is overcompensation to be considered a relevant...

In the economic literature on market competition, firms are often modeled as single decision makers and the internal organization of the firm is neglected (unitary player assumption). However, as the literature on strategic delegation suggests, one can not generally expect that the behavior of...

By enriching a principal-agent model it is shown that the introduction of monetary incentives may reduce an agent's motivation. In a first step, we allow for the possibility that some agents stick to unverifiable agreements. The larger the fraction of reliable agents, the lower powered will then...

In this contribution we examine the interrelation between intra-firm wage increases and firm performance. Previous studies have focused on the dispersion of wages in order to examine for the empirical dominance of positive monetary incentive effects compared to adverse effects due to fairness...

The benefits and costs of different forms of job design have been analyzed in the literature yet. The focus has thereby mostly been on job designs under formal contracts between the parties. However, in the real world relational contracts - informal agreements sustained by the value of future...

Many experiments indicate that most individuals are not purely motivated by material self interest, but also care about the well being of others. In this paper we examine tournaments among inequity averse agents, who dislike disadvantageous inequity (envy) and advantageous inequity (compassion)....

We identify a new problem that may arise when heterogeneous workers are motivated by relative performance schemes: If workers’ abilities and the production technology are complements, the firm may prefer not to adopt a more advanced technology even though this technology would costlessly...