We model deferred compensation as a share of an uncertain futureprofit granted by a financially constrained employer to her employeein mutual agreement. Deferred compensation serves as a retentionmechanism, helping the employer to avoid bankruptcy. The optimalcombination of cash and deferred...

We present a model where compensation within a workteam is determinedendogenously by the use of a rank-order tournament. Team memberscompete in their efforts for the right to propose the distribution of a prizewithin the team. The implementation of a proposal requires the approvalof other team...

Although relative performance schemes are pervasive in organizations reliable empirical dataon induced sabotage behavior is almost non-existent. We study sabotage in tournaments in acontrolled laboratory experiment and are able to confirm one of the key insights from theory:effort and sabotage...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insuranceand a “good” allocation of effort across various tasks is oftenidentified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision,signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity(congruity,...

This paper experimentally investigates the impact of different pay and relative performance information policies on employee effort. We explore three information policies: No feedback about relative performance, feedback given halfway through the production period, and continuously updated...

We analyze the following questions associated with outsourcing and profit sharing under imperfect labour markets. How does strategic outsourcing influence wage formation, profit sharing and employee effort when firms commit to optimal profit sharing before wage formation or decide for profit...

Subjective evaluations are widely used, but call for different contracts from classical moral-hazard settings. Previous literature shows that contracts require payments to third parties. I show that the (implicit) assumption of deterministic contracts makes payments to third parties necessary....

Employment protection harms early-career employees without benefitting them in later career stages (Leonardi and Pica, 2013). We demonstrate that this pattern can result from employers exploiting na¨ıve present-biased employees. Employers offer a dynamic contract with low early-career wages,...

A growing empirical literature attributes much of the productivity advantages of large, "superstar" firms to their adoption of best practice management techniques that allow them to better identify and use talented workers. The reasons for the incomplete adoption of these "structured management...

Despite the prevalence of non-routine analytical team tasks in modern economies, little is understood regarding how incentives influence performance in these tasks. In a series of field experiments involving more than 5,000 participants, we investigate how incentives alter behavior in teams...