This paper explores the relationship between disclosing corporate targets and value creation. Our empirical results show the value relevance of voluntarily disclosing a low number of targets, whereas there is a clear additional positive effect of disclosing exactly one corporate target in the...

Distorted performance measures in compensation contracts elicit suboptimal behavioral responses that may even prove to be dysfunctional (gaming). This paper applies the empirical test developed by Courty and Marschke (2008) to detect whether the widely used class of Residual Income based...

Contract audits aimed at reducing information asymmetry and transaction costs are frequently used in imperfect markets such as defense procurement. This contradicts predictions from standard economic theory. We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate this paradox. Our laboratory setup...

This paper reports the results from a large-scale laboratory experiment investigating the impact of tournament incentives and wage gifts on creativity. We find that tournaments substantially increase creative output, with no evidence for crowding out of intrinsic motivation. By comparison, wage...

This paper reports the results of an individual real effort laboratory experiment where subjects are paid for measured performance. Measured performance equals actual performance plus noise. We compare a stable environment where the noise is small with a volatile environment where the noise is...

Women are often less willing than men to compete, even in tasks where there is no gender gap in performance. Also, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful and previous research has documented that men and women sometimes react differently to acute stressors. We use two...

We examine how self-selection of workers into firms depends on the power of the firms' incentive schemes and how it affects the performance of firms that increase the power of the incentive schemes. In a laboratory experiment, we let subjects choose between (low-powered) team incentives and...

Theoretical analyses of (optimal) performance measures are typically performed within the realm of the linear agency model. This model implies that, for a given compensation scheme, the agent’s optimal effort is unrelated to the amount of noise in the performance measure. In contrast,...

Reimbursement of commuting costs by employers has attracted little attention from economists. We develop a theoretical model of a monopsonistic employer who determines an optimal recruitment policy in a spatial labour market with search frictions and show that partial reimbursement of commuting...

In Europe, company cars are offered by employers as fringe benefits to their employees at a lower price than employees pay in the car market, mainly due to favourable taxation of company cars. We analyse the welfare effects of favourable taxation of company cars for the Netherlands. The...