This paper examines the effects of performance incentives in a federal job training program for the economically disadvantaged. I find that job training bureaucrats respond to incentives in ways that are consistent with a simple model of bureaucratic behavior. Additionally I am able to test...

We present a model of how organizations manage performance measures when gaming is revealed over time. The incentive designer does not know when it selects a performance measure whether it will communicate the right behavior. Only over time does the principal find out the agent's responses and...

Despite the broad interest in performance measurement during the past 20 years, few state and local governments actually use performance measures as a management tool. A possible reason for this puzzle is that performance measurement systems are difficult to successfully implement. In this paper...

We develop and test a model of the patenting and R&D decisions of an innovating firm whose researcher-employees sometime quit to join or start a rival. In our model, the innovating firm patents to protect itself from its workers. We show theoretically that the risk of a scientist's departure...

This paper studies a particular kind of gaming responses to explicit incentives in a large government organization. The gaming responses we consider occur when agents strategically report their performance outcomes to maximize their awards. An important contribution of this work is to examine...

We present a model of how organizations manage performance measures when gaming is revealed over time. The incentive designer does not know when it selects a performance measure whether it will communicate the right behavior. Only over time does the principal find out the agent's responses and...

This paper examines the effects of performance incentives in a federal job training program for the poor. I find that job training bureaucrats respond to incentives in ways that are consistent with a simple model of bureaucratic behavior. Additionally I am able to test whether attempts by the...

This paper studies the provision of incentives in a large U.S. training organization which is divided in about 50 independent pools of training agencies. The number and the size of the agencies within each pool vary greatly. Each pool distributes performance incentive awards to the training...

Between 1961 and 1985, the annual domestic patent application count in the U.S. varied within a narrow range of 59,000 and 72,000. Patent applications have risen dramatically in the last decade by 70 percent, reaching 124,000 in 1995. Patents granted have risen commensurately. In this paper, we...

We describe the evolution of a performance measurement system in a government job-training program. In this program, a federal agency establishes performance measures and standards for sub-state agencies. We show that the performance measurement system's evolution is at least partly explained as...