Two firms produce a good with a horizontal and a vertical characteristic called quality. The difference in the unobservable quality levels determines how the firms share the market. We consider two scenarios: In the first one, firms disclose quality; in the second one, they send costly signals...

New international standards for environmental auditing are now being actively promoted by public authorities and adopted by private firms. One important feature of these standards is their emphasis on managerial systems and incentives that support a wiser use of environmental resources. This...

We consider the response to incentives as an explanation for productivity differences within a firm that paid its workers piece rates. We provide a framework within which observed productivity differences can be decomposed into two parts: one due to differences in ability and the other due to...

Information Systems (IS) researchers often rely on organizational economics models to describe and explain various IS management issues. While those models are found to be useful, measures are yet to be proposed to assess the dimensions of IS transactions. In this paper, we present the results...

Our objective in this paper is to illustrate and better understand the unavoidable arbitrage between incentives and flexibility in contexts of asymmetric information and to characterize the general features of an appropriate response to this challenge. We show that procedures and institutions in...

We apply agency theory to the payroll records of a copper mine that paid a production bonus to teams of workers. As with most incentive pay used by firms, the bonus was simpler in form than the optimal contract that balances incentives, insurance, and free-riding. We explore whether transactions...

We examine the effects of different sequences of work and rest on the daily productivity of workers who planted trees in the province of British Columbia, Canada, comparing the intertemporal productivity profiles of planters who were paid either fixed wages or piece rates. We find that planters...

Data from a field experiment are used to estimate the gain in productivity that is realized when workers are paid piece rates rather than fixed wages. The experiment was conducted within a tree-planting firm and provides daily observations on individual worker productivity under both copensation...

If policy prescriptions for compensation systems are to be useful, then they must be based on the empirical analysis of incentive effects; i.e., the elasticity of worker effort with respect to changes in the compensation system. We measure the elasticity of worker effort with respect to changes...

The role of field experiments in evaluating the effect of compensation policies on worker productivity is considered. Particular attention is paid to the ability of a field experiment to identify the effect of a permanent change in firm policy. While field experiments solve endogeneity problems...