Economists have for a long time argued that performance-based bonuses raise performance. Indeed, many firms use bonuses tied to individual performance to motivate their employees. However, there has been heated debate among human resources professionals recently, and some firms have moved away...

We study the impact of managers on the success of professional soccer teams using data from the German "Bundesliga". We evaluate the performance impact of individual managers by estimating regression models that include both team and manager fixed effects, where we are exploiting the high...

A model is analyzed in which agents exert effort to create innovations within an organization. When payments are infeasible, the decision on the implementation of a proposal is shown to bemadeby simplemonotonic decision rules. A trade-off arises between the use of information and the incentives...

A theory of responsibility is provided in a simple model where agents care for their career prospects. First, two agents with uncertain abilities work on a task. Second, a principal decides to promote one of them. Three types of equilibria occur. One in which no agent is responsible for the task...

In an asymmetric tournament model with endogenous risk choice by the agents it is shown that equilibrium efforts decrease (increase) with risk if abilities are sufficiently similar (different). Risk also affects winning probabilities. The interaction of both effects is analyzed.

We study the incentive effects of grating supervisors access to objective performance information when agents work on multiple tasks. We first analyze a formal model showing that incentives are lower powered when supervisors have no access to objective measures but assess performance...