We examine the realism of the assumption of self-interested opportunism in agency theory. We place subjects into manager/producer pairs and set parameters so that the producer extracts the highest share of residual earnings from the manager by setting the budget at zero (100% slack) and...

Although neoclassical economic theory predicts that fixed cost magnitude and fixed cost reporting format will not influence short-term pricing decisions, these factors systematically affected pricing decisions in a duopoly experiment. Increasing fixed cost magnitude (a pure sunk cost in this...

Although neoclassical economic theory predicts that fixed cost magnitude and fixed cost reporting format will not influence short-term pricing decisions, these factors systematically affected pricing decisions in a duopoly experiment. Increasing fixed cost magnitude (a pure sunk cost in this...

Tournament incentive schemes offer payments dependent on relative performance and thereby are intended to motivate agents to exert productive effort. Unfortunately, however, an agent may also be tempted to destroy the production of his competitors in order to improve the own relative position....

In a contest players compete for winning a prize by effort and thereby increasing their probability of winning. Contestants, however, could also improve their own relative position by harming the other players. We experimentally analyze contests with heterogeneous agents who may individually...

In many environments, tournaments can elicit more effort from workers, except perhapswhen workers can sabotage each other. Because it is hard to separate effort, ability andoutput in many real workplace settings, the empirical evidence on the incentive effect oftournaments is thin...

Although relative performance schemes are pervasive in organizations reliable empirical dataon induced sabotage behavior is almost non-existent. We study sabotage in tournaments in acontrolled laboratory experiment and are able to confirm one of the key insights from theory:effort and sabotage...

We study how help can be fostered by means of a team bonus in the presence of rank-order tournaments. In a simple model we combine elements of relative rewards and a team bonus and study their effect on effort, help and sabotage. Quite intuitively the theoretical analysis suggests that team...

We study, how help can be fostered under relative rewards by means of team bonus and corporate value statements. A simple model analysis suggests that team members help less as relative rewards increase. As one potential measure to encourage help, we augment relative rewards with team rewards...

The importance of fair and equal treatment of workers is at the heart of the debate in organizational management. In this regard, we study how reward mechanisms and production technologies affect effort provision in teams. Our experimental results demonstrate that unequal rewards can potentially...