An Empirical Investigation of Gaming Responses to Performance Incentives

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 whether this behavior diverts resources (e.g. agents' time) from productive activities or whether it simply reflects an accounting phenomenon. We evaluate the efficiency impact of the behavior we identify and find that it has a negative impact on the true goal of the organization.