We conduct a field experiment studying how financial incentives for achieving specific course grades affect university students, whether effects vary by ability, and whether allowing students to choose their goals improves outcomes. We find that incentives negatively affect performance,...

Between and within firms, work teams compete against each other and receive feedback on how well their team is performing relative to their benchmarks. In this paper we investigate experimentally how teams respond to relative performance feedback (RPF) at team level. We find that when subjects...

This paper suggests a way of aligning two economically related, but sometimes antinomic in interests goals: enterprise performance indicators and respectively connected pay system using goal-based motivational design. Responding to this, the aspects of enterprise performance/pay relations are...

Although relative performance feedback can positively influence employee performance, its effect tends to be mixed for employees who underperform compared to their peers. We conducted a field experiment testing whether basing relative performance feedback on inputs, which is relative performance...

Equity-based compensation causes increases in firms' share count and dilutes Earnings Per Share (EPS), which provides firms with an incentive to raise EPS using either share buybacks or earnings management. We employ a regression discontinuity framework to provide evidence of a causal link...