The Peter Principle captures two stylized facts about hierarchies: first, promotions often place employees into jobs for which they are less well suited than for that previously held. Second, demotions are extremely rare. Why do organizations not correct 'wrong' promotion decision? This paper...

Goals are an important source of motivation. But little is known about why and how people set them. We address these questions in a model based on two stylized facts from psychology and behavioral economics: i) Goals serve as reference points for performance. ii) Present-biased preferences...

Self-administered rewards are ubiquitous. They serve as incentives for personal accomplishments and are widely recommended as tools for overcoming self-control problems. However, it seems puzzling why self-rewards can work: the prospect of a reward has a motivating force only if the threat of...

It is a puzzle why people often evaluate consequences of choices separately (narrow bracketing) rather than jointly (broad bracketing). We study the hypothesis that a present-biased individual, who faces two tasks, may bracket his goals narrowly for motivational reasons. Goals motivate because...

We model how people formulate and evaluate goals to overcome self-control problems. People often attempt to regulate their behavior by evaluating goal-related outcomes separately (in narrow psychological accounts) rather than jointly (in a broad account). To explain this evidence, our theory of...

Cultural diversity is a complex and multi-faceted concept. Commonly used quantitative measures of the spatial distribution of culturally-defined groups – such as segregation, isolation or concentration indexes - are often only capable of identifying just one aspect of this distribution. The...

Cultural diversity - in various forms - has in recent years turned into a prominent and relevant research and policy issue. There is an avalanche of studies across many disciplines that measure and analyse cultural diversity and its impacts. Based on different perspectives and features of the...

In this paper we conduct a laboratory experiment to test the extent to which Moore and Repullo's subgame perfect implementation mechanism induces truth-telling in practice, both in a setting with perfect information and in a setting where buyers and sellers face a small amount of uncertainty...

This paper presents an operationalization of a mixed Bourdieu–Mincer-type model that seeks to find evidence for individual and local cultural capital effects on human capital 'ability'. We aim to compare these effects for native workers and immigrants (as well as between immigrants themselves)...

To innovate, employees need to develop novel ideas and coordinate with each other to turn these ideas into better products and services. Work outcomes provide signals about employees' abilities to the labor market, and therefore career concerns arise. These can both be 'good' (enhancing...