In an environment where three-person groups develop a creative solution to an important problem, we examine whether the efficacy of either individual or group-based creativity-contingent incentives depends on whether they take the piece-rate or tournament form. We predict and find that group...

This paper analyzes a principal-agent-model with a principal, a manager, and a team of workers to investigate the incentive provision and optimal team size in a setting with uncertain productivity and team synergy effects which is typical for innovation environments. Workers are responsible for...

This paper investigates the factors that make teams successful in competitive environments. In collaboration with a medium-sized Latin-American bank, we designed a series of contests among the branches of the bank, in which we varied the prize structure of the tournaments (in some tournaments,...

This paper analyzes the impact of heterogeneous (social) preferences on the weighting and combination of performance measures as well as on a firm's profitability. We consider rivalry, egoism and altruism as extreme forms within the continuum of possible preferences and show that the principal...

This paper addresses the question, what metrics should be used for performance evaluation and in particular how they should be weighted and combined in the presence of technological interdependencies when the agents exhibit variedly strong developed rivalry. We find that the principal reacts to...

This paper studies the effect of agents’ access to pre-decision information, depending on whether only group performance is rewarded or individual performance is rewarded. Pre-decision information only affects agents’ incentives, which in turn depend on the type of performance evaluation...

Firms have long used recognition programs to engage and motivate employees. However, minimal research has examined the effectiveness of these programs in actual organizational settings. We predict that the adoption of a team-based recognition program will be associated with significant...

One acclaimed role of managers is to monitor workers in team production processes and discipline them through the threat of terminating them from the team (Alchian and Demsetz, 1972). We extend a standard weakest link experiment with a manager that can decide to replace some of her team members...

The successful foundation of entrepreneurial firms comprises a multitude of complementary human tasks. Within entrepreneurial teams, the effect of founders' human capital on firm success hinges on the information structure that prevails when nascent entrepreneurs are matched in partnerships....

This study shifts attention from project-based firms (PBFs) to project network organizations (PNOs) as increasingly important interorganizational contexts of project collaboration. As a result of organizational specialization, PNOs have emerged as generic organizational forms combining the...