Many incentive plans are inherently ambiguous, lacking an explicit mapping between performance and compensation. Using an online labor market, Amazon Mechanical Turk, we study the effect of ambiguity on willingness to accept contracts to do a real-effort task as well as completion and...

This paper examines the responses of North American academics to the recent wave of accounting and audit scandals, pointing out that the main response has either been to appeal to a moralistic concept of ethics or to portray them as isolated incidents or indicative of problems elsewhere (e.g....

This paper examines the effect of income inequality on individual wellbeing. The results show that those in the lowest twenty percent of income distribution have a marked reduction in wellbeing compared to the remainder. Hence, poverty is detrimental to wellbeing. The second key finding of this...

We augment a standard bilateral gift exchange game so employees can send messages at the same time as choosing an effort level. Employee effort (controlling for wages) is unaffected by allowing messages, but wages dramatically increase. Messages affect wages because employees give managers...

This paper synthesizes findings from an ongoing research program on learning in signaling games. The present paper focuses on crossgame learning (the ability of subjects to take what has been learned in one game and generalize it to related games), an issue that has been ignored in most of the...

Abstract: Many incentive plans do not include an explicit mapping between workers’ performance and compensation. Potential employees therefore face both risk and uncertainty when choosing whether to accept an employment contract. Using an online labor market, Amazon Mechanical Turk, we...

Extensive field evidence shows individuals’ decisions in settings involving choice under uncertainty (e.g. savings and investment choices) depend on the decisions of their peers. One hypothesized cause of peer group effects is social interaction effects: an individual’s utility from an...