This paper investigates the effects of managerial incentives on favoritism in promotion decisions. First, we theoretically show that favoritism leads to a lower quality of promotion decisions and in turn lower efforts. But the effect can be mitigated by pay-for-performance incentives for...

This paper studies the influence of information on entry choices in a competition with a controlled laboratory experiment. We investigate whether information provision attracts mainly high productivity individuals and reduces competition failure, where competition failure occurs when a subject...

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

Using a controlled experiment, we examine the role of nurture in explaining the stylized fact that women shy away from competition. Our subjects (students just under 15 years of age) attend publicly-funded single-sex and coeducational schools. We find robust differences between the competitive...

The ability of groups to implement efficiency-enhancing institutions is emerging as a central theme of research in economics. This paper explores voting on a scheme of intergroup competition, which facilitates cooperation in a social dilemma situation. Experimental results show that the...

Concerns about corporate scandals and abusive leadership suggest that individuals with an opportunistic and manipulative personality take advantage of incomplete incentive and control systems to get their way into managerial positions. Against this background, we examine whether there is an...

Many experiments indicate that most individuals are not purely motivated by material self interest, but also care about the well being of others. In this paper we examine tournaments among inequity averse agents, who dislike disadvantageous inequity (envy) and advantageous inequity (compassion)....

The dearth of women in top managerial positions is characterized by a high persistence and insensitivity to changes and differences in institutions and policies. This suggests it could be caused by slowly changing social norms and attitudes in the labor market, such as gender stereotypes and...