In many environments, tournaments can elicit more effort from workers, except perhaps when workers can sabotage each other. Because it is hard to separate effort, ability and output in many real workplace settings, the empirical evidence on the incentive effect of tournaments is thin. There is...

Monitoring by peers is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems. Most explanations of the efficacy of mutual monitoring rely either on small group size or on a version of the Folk theorem with repeated interactions which requires reasonably accurate public information...

Empirical studies of the principal-agent relationship find that extrinsic incentives work in many instances, linking rewards to performance increases effort, but that they can also backfire, reducing effort. Intrinsic motivation, the internal drive to work to master a skill or to improve one's...

Economic theory predicts that agents will work harder if they believe in the "mission" of the organization. Well-identified estimates of exactly how much harder they will work have been elusive, however, because agents select into jobs. We conduct a real effort experiment with participants who...

Fixed-wage workers comprise the bulk of the labor force and yet little is known about how they respond to wage changes. Given recent interest in theories of reciprocity and intrinsic motivation and their implications for effort provision, the neoclassical prediction seems less obvious today. To...