This study analyzes how individuals evaluate their peers' performance in a high stakes tournament in response to being randomly assigned to an age homogenous or heterogeneous group using data from two TV shows. The data also allows us to explore superior evaluations because it contains objective...

This study analyzes the gender gap in self- and peer evaluations based on a laboratory experiment. Five players performed a creativity task in a high-stakes winner-takes-all tournament. The treatment without validation informed all players that evaluations that they will conduct determine who...

According to psychologists and neuroscientists, a key source of intrinsic motivation is learning. An economic model of this is presented. Learning may make work less onerous, or the employee may value it in and of itself. Multitasking generates learning: performing one task increases...

We compare evaluations of employee performance by individuals and groups of supervisors, analyzing a formal model and running a laboratory experiment. The model predicts that multi-rater evaluations are more precise than single-rater evaluations if groups rationally aggregate their signals about...

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 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 study the impact of communication on behavior in a two-stage coordination game with asymmetric payoffs. We test experimentally whether individuals can avoid a head-to-head confrontation by means of coordinated strategies. In particular we analyze whether and how quickly a conflict-avoidance...

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...