Using car dealership data, we examine the relevance of forward-looking (FL) and contemporaneous (CO) measures for pay-for-performance incentives (bonus, annual raise, promotions) for long-horizon employees. Economic models suggest that while contracts with FL performance measures mitigates the...

To address agents' moral hazard over effort, incentive contracts impose risk on the agents. As performance measures become noisier, the conventional agency analysis predicts that principals will reduce the incentive weights assigned to such measures. However, prior empirical results (Prendergast...

This study empirically examines two basic questions. First, where and why do firms make greater or lesser use of subjectivity in the performance evaluations that lead to annual bonuses? Second, what are the effects of greater or lesser use of subjectivity on employee pay satisfaction? We examine...

We examine how incentive systems influence knowledge transfer between group members with equal or different status who solve an interdependent task. In our experiment, group members receive group or individual incentives, while status is manipulated by assigning job titles with corresponding...

In this paper, we investigate the role of financial incentives and social incentives in multi-task settings where the agent makes an effort level choice and an effort allocation choice. We focus on a setting where these choices are not independent and an active trade-off between effort level and...

Prior research establishes that boards of directors can encourage risk-averse managers to take risky actions by providing stock options and severance pay. We demonstrate that the ability of these incentives to encourage risk-taking hinges on the level of uncertainty facing the manager, and that...

This paper shows that in a model of managerial delegation in duopoly market structure, if the managers' salary varies with the incentive schemes offered by the owners, then the well-known results of equilibrium incentive scheme (by Fershtman and Judd, 1987, A.E.R.) get modified. In case of...

This paper studies, in a dynamic agency setting, how incentives and contractual efficiency are affected by leading indicators of firms' future financial performance. In our two-period model, a leading indicator variable provides a noisy forecast of the uncertain return from the manager's...

Classical agency theory argues that economic incentives can have a strong impact on opportunistic reporting behavior. On the other hand, behavioral literature suggests that agents also adhere to descriptive norms established by peers. Most studies examine these effects in isolation, ignoring the...

Principals make decisions on various issues, ranging from contract design to control system implementation. Few studies examine the principal’s active role in these decisions. We experimentally investigate this role by studying how a principal’s choice for a truth-telling incentive contract,...