Personnel records are used to examine compensation, recruitment, and retention of a group of very highly skilled workers: civilian scientists and engineers in U.S. Department of Defense laboratories. In contrast to the private sector, returns to skills were largely flat for this group from...

In knowledge-intensive economies, ideas and innovation are key drivers of a company's competitiveness and success. In such a climate a company must strategise methods designed to incentivize the generation of new ideas and build a culture that rewards the production of knowledge. Many scholars...

We study effects of a firm's attempt to optimize an existing incentive scheme to increase sales growth for direct store delivery workers. Before optimization workers reported Ratchet Effects that lowered productivity. The altered incentive plan offered higher compensation for increased sales...

We develop a simple model of the effects of reputation on prices. An increasing fraction of consumers who are “naive” (less informed about quality) results in a stronger sensitivity of prices to ratings of quality. We then argue that this may be a factor in price dynamics for goods that...

We study the effects of a field experiment designed to motivate employee ideas, at a large technology company. Employees were encouraged to submit ideas on process and product improvements via an online system. In the experiment, the company randomized 19 account teams into treatment and control...

Drawing on a single large U.S. corporation's personnel records for the years 1989–93, the authors analyze an example of the kind of formal salary system used by most large firms. They find that this firm's practices were consistent with most of the important conclusions of prior empirical...

A large, mature and robust economic literature on pay for performance now exists, which provides a useful framework for thinking about pay for performance systems. I use the lessons of the literature to discuss how to design and implement pay for performance in practice.

We study the effects of a field experiment designed to motivate employee ideas, at a large technology company. Employees were encouraged to submit ideas on process and product improvements via an online system. In the experiment, the company randomized 19 account teams into treatment and control...

We study the effects of a field experiment designed to motivate employee ideas, at a large technology company. Employees were encouraged to submit ideas on process and product improvements via an online system. In the experiment, the company randomized 19 account teams into treatment and control...

We develop a simple model of the effects of reputation on wine prices. An increasing fraction of consumers who are “naïve” (less well informed about wine quality) results in a stronger sensitivity of wine prices to ratings of quality. We then use data on prices and Robert Parker’s ratings...