In an experiment with professionals from the financial services sector, we investigate the impact of a team incentive scheme on the recommendation quality of investment products when advisors benefit from advising lower quality products. Experimental results reveal that, when group affiliation...

In an experiment with professionals from the financial services sector, we investigate the impact of a team incentive scheme on recommendation quality of investment products when advisors benefit from advising lower quality products. Experimental results reveal that, when group affiliation is...

A main prediction of agency theory is the well known risk-incentive trade-off. Incentive contracts should be found in environments with little uncertainty and for agents with low degrees of risk aversion. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the first trade-off. Due to lack of...

A main prediction of agency theory is the well known risk-incentive trade-off. Incentive contracts should be found in environments with little uncertainty and for agents with low degrees of risk aversion. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the first trade-off. Due to lack of...

We empirically investigate the impact of incentive scheme structure on the degree of cooperation in firms using a unique and representative data set. Combining employee survey data with detailed firm level information on the relative importance of individual, team, and company performance for...

It is often claimed that supervisors do not differentiate enough between high and low performing employees when evaluating performance. The purpose of this paper is to study the incentive effects of this behavior empirically. We first show in a simple model that the perceived degree of past...

We examine ways of funding higher education, comparing upfront tuition fees with graduate taxes. The tax dominates, as volatility in future income is transferred from risk-averse students to the risk-neutral state. However, a double moral hazard problem arises when students’ efforts to raise...

How to hire voluntary helpers? We shed new light on this question by reporting a field experiment in which we invited 2,859 students to help at the 'ESA Europe 2012' conference. Invitation emails varied non-monetary and monetary incentives to convince subjects to offer help. Students could apply...

We investigate the relationship between tournament prices and effort choices in the presence of favoritism. High tournament prizes can decrease agents’ effort supply when the choice of the winner is not perfectly objective but affected to some extent by personal preferences of an evaluator.

We conduct a field experiment in a naturally occurring labor environment and track whether the performance of workers responds to unexpected wage increases. Specifically, we investigate how the timing of wage increases affects efforts. We find that workers performance is about 11% higher for the...