Business executives and academics frequently criticize budget-based compensation plans as providing incentives for subordinates to build slack into proposed budgets. In this paper, we examine whether either of two practices - using budgets to allocate scarce resources, or providing information...

We use a laboratory experiment to investigate how the level of a budget assigned to an employee by a firm owner affects employee effort. Consistent with reciprocity and fairness models, we find a negative relationship between budget levels and employee effort - many employees responded to a low...