Motivated agents are characterized by increasing their effort if their work generates not only a monetary return for them but also a benefit for a mission they support. While their motivation may stem from working for their preferred (i.e., the `right') mission, it may also be the principal's...

When two or more agents compete for a bonus and the agents' productivity in each of several possible occurrences depends stochastically on (constant) effort, the number of times that are checked to assign the bonus affects the level of un-certainty in the selection process. Uncertainty, in turn,...

As firms implement tournament bonus reward schemes, mainly the idea is to introduce competition amongst their agents in the order to promote their performance. Tournaments in which agents compete for a bonus by investing effort, are frequently applied, e.g., in development races, political...

This note reports a replication study of Falk and Kosfeld's (2006) medium control treatment. In the experimental game, an agent has an endowment of 120 experimental currency units and decides how much to transfer to a principal. For every unit that the agent gives up, the principal receives two...

We study interaction effects between intra-firm conflicts and interfirm competition on a duopolistic market with seller firms employing one or more agents and implementing tournament incentives. We show that inter-firm competition leads to higher incentive intensity, higher efforts and output...

We report three repetitions of Falk and Kosfeld's (2006) C5 and C10 treatments whose results largely conflict with those of the original study. We mainly observe hidden costs of control of low magnitude which lead to low-trust principal-agent relationships. We also report an extension where...

An advisor is supposed to recommend a financial product in the best interest of her client. However, the best product for the client may not always be the product yielding the highest commission (paid by product providers) to the advisor. Do advisors nevertheless provide truthful advice? If not,...

We study the interaction of organizational culture and personal prosocial orientation in team work where teams compete against each other. In a computerized lab experiment with minimal group design, we prime subjects to two alternative organizational cultures emphasizing either self-enhancement...

Gender-specific patterns of self-selection into competitive and cooperative environments may have multiple reasons. One of the most prominent explanations to this point is, that there are inherent differences between men and women when it comes to preferences regarding competition. We take a...

The market for retail financial products (e.g. investment funds or insurances) is marred by information asymmetries. Clients are not well informed about the quality of these products. They have to rely on the recommendations of advisors. Incentives of advisors and clients may not be aligned,...