To address agents' moral hazard over effort, incentive contracts impose risk on the agents. As performance measures become noisier, the conventional agency analysis predicts that principals will reduce the incentive weights assigned to such measures. However, prior empirical results (Prendergast...

This study utilizes a national survey of physicians in the United States, administered four times between 1996 and 2005, to examine the use of non-financial performance measures in physician compensation contracts. Consistent with agency theory, we find that non-financial measures are used more...