This article investigates the pricing distortions that arise from the use of a common nonlinear incentive scheme at a leading enterprise software vendor. The empirical results demonstrate that salespeople are adept at gaming the timing of deal closure to take advantage of the vendor’s...

We investigate how the convexity of a firm's incentives interacts with worker overconfidence to affect sorting decisions and performance. We demonstrate, experimentally, that overconfident employees are more likely to sort into a nonlinear incentive scheme over a linear one, even though this...

When explaining others’ behaviors, achievements, and failures, it is common for people to attribute too much influence to the individual’s disposition and too little influence to the structural and situational influences impinging on the actor. Although performance is a joint function of...

Three laboratory studies investigate the hypothesis that the presence of wealth may influence people's propensity to engage in unethical behavior. In the experiments, participants are given the opportunity to cheat by overstating their performance or by stealing money. In each study, one group...

People routinely engage in dishonest acts without feeling guilty about their behavior. When and why does this occur? Across four studies, people justified their dishonest deeds through moral disengagement and exhibited motivated forgetting of information that might otherwise limit their...

Sustaining operational productivity in the completion of repetitive tasks is critical to many organizations' success. Yet research points to two different work-design-related strategies for accomplishing this goal: <i>specialization</i> to capture the benefits of repetition and <i>variety</i> (i.e., working...

We present six studies demonstrating that outcome information biases ethical judgments of others' ethically-questionable behaviors. In particular, we show that the same behaviors produce more ethical condemnation when they happen to produce bad rather than good outcomes, even if the outcomes are...

People rely on others' advice to make judgments on a daily basis. In three studies, we examine the differential impacts of similarity between the source of that advice and the person making the judgment in two settings: judging others' behavior and judging one's own actions. We find that...