This paper examines the relationship between organization contextual variables and humanresource management (HRM) practices in small firms. The proposed model is based on anintegration of theoretical perspectives, including the resource-based approach, institutionaltheory, transaction cost...

This paper studies a principal-agent relation in which the principal's private information about the agent's effort choice is more accurate than a noisy public performance measure. For some contingencies the optimal contract has to specify ex post inefficiencies in the form of inefficient...

We manipulate workers' perceived meaning of a job in a field experiment. Half of the workers are informed that their job is important, the other half are told that their job is of no relevance. Results show that workers exert more effort when meaning is high, corroborating previous findings on...

The performance of a work team commonly depends on the effort exerted by the team members as well as on the division of tasks among them. However, when leaders assign tasks to team members, performance is usually not the only consideration. Favouritism, employees' seniority, employees'...

This paper investigates the optimal design of incentives when agents distort probabilities. We show that the type of probability distortion displayed by the agent and its degree determine whether an incentivecompatible contract can be implemented, the strength of the incentives included in the...

This paper studies investment incentives in the steady state of a dynamic bilateral matching market. Because of search frictions, both parties in a match are partially locked-in when they bargain over the joint surplus from their sunk investments. The associated holdup problem depends on market...

Comparative payment schemes and tournament-style promotion mechanisms are ubiquitous in the work place. We test experimentally whether they have a negative impact on the willingness to cooperate. Participants first perform in a simple task and then participate in a public goods game. The payment...

Can a firm increase its workers' eff ort by introducing competition through performance-based ranking? On one hand such ranking can increase eff ort because of individuals' desire for status from high ranks, but on the other, it can demotivate them or make them wary of outperforming peers. This...

Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...

In this paper we investigate the impact of upper and middle level managers on firm performance by simultaneously estimating manager and match qualities for management pairings in Major League Baseball (MLB). We document the economic significance of managers at both organizational levels and...