Developments within social and exact sciences take place because scientists engage in scientificpractices that allow them to further expand and refine the scientific concepts within theirscientific disciplines. There is disagreement among scientists as to what the essential practicesare that...

We conduct a field experiment in a large retail chain to test basic predictions of tournament theory regarding prize spread and noise. A random subset of the 208 stores participates in two-stage elimination tournaments. Tournaments differ in the distribution of prize money across winners of the...

We conduct a field experiment among 189 stores of a retail chain to study dynamic incentive effects of relative performance pay. Employees in the randomly selected treatment stores could win a bonus by outperforming three comparable stores from the control group over the course of four weeks....

This discussion paper has led to a publication in the <I>Journal of Labor Economics</I>, 2013, 32(2), 305-326.<P> We ran a field experiment in a Dutch retail chain consisting of 128 stores. In a random sample of these stores, we introduced short-term sales competitions among subsets of stores. We find...</p></i>