Rank-order relative-performance evaluation, in which pay, promotion and symbolic awards depend on the rank of workers in the distribution of performance, is ubiquitous. Whenever firms use rank-order relative-performance evaluation, workers receive feedback about their rank. Using a real-effort...

We study how upward communication - from workers to managers - about individual efforts affects the effectiveness of gift exchange as a contract-enforcement device for work teams. Our findings suggest that the use of such self-assessments can be detrimental to workers' performance. In the...

We report results from a sender-receiver deception game, which tests whether an individual's decision to deceive is influenced by a concern for relative standing in a reference group. The sender ranks six possible outcomes, each specifying a payoff for him and the receiver. A message is then...

This paper investigates the effect of different communication channels on promise-making and promise-keeping in a helping situation. Four treatments differ with respect to the communication channel employed to solicit unincentivized cooperation, i.e., face-to-face, phone call and two different...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (the IMF) and a country has for the optimal design of conditional reforms. Our model predicts that when agency problems are especially severe, and/or IMF information is valuable, a centralized control is indeed...

Human communication in organizations often involves a large amount of gossiping about others. Here we study in an experiment whether gossip affects the efficiency of human interactions. We let subjects play a trust game. Third parties observe a trustee's behavior and can gossip about it by...