Employees face volume–value trade-offs when they perform tasks with multiple characteristics, leaving them with a choice between different strategies towards the goal of maximizing the total value of their output. Either they produce many, less valuable units of output (volume strategy); or...

We investigate whether referral-based hiring exacerbates or mitigates control problems. Incentive contracts can be used to attract employees with certain traits. However, whether the outcomes are positive for the firm or not depends on the quality of incentive contracts. Our research setting...

The term ‘incentive' (from Latin incentivum ‘something that sets the tune') is a tangible and/or intangible reward that motivates people and creates favorable environmental conditions to maximize performance to achieve specific goals in organization or competition and/or society

We study employee absence in Danish organizations. In contrast to Steers and Rhodes (1978), who stress the importance of individual and organizational characteristics in shaping employees' motivation to attend work, we show that absence is predominantly an individualized phenomenon. Because the...

Motivating human capital in knowledge-intensive activities is a serious managerial challenge because it is difficult to link rewards to actions or performance. Firms instead might motivate knowledge workers by offering them opportunities to increase personal benefits (e.g., learning,...

Using ten waves (1998-2007) of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), this paper investigates the ceteris paribus association between the intensity of incentive pay, the dynamic change in bonus status and the utility derived from work. After controlling for individual heterogeneity biases,...

People are generally assumed to shy away from activities generating stochastic rewards, thus requiring extra compensation for handling any additional risk. In contrast with this view, neuroscience research with animals has shown that stochastic rewards may act as a powerful motivator. Applying...

This paper studies how pay transparency affects organizations that reward employees based on their efforts (i.e., using "subjective performance evaluation"). First, we show that transparency triggers social comparisons that require the organization to pay its employees an "envy premium". This...

Using a large-scale real effort experiment, we explore whether and how different peer assignment mechanisms affect worker performance and stress. Letting individuals choose whom to compare to increases productivity to the same extent as a targeted exogenous matching policy aimed at maximizing...

Whereas economists have made extensive studies of the impact of levels of incentives on behavior, they have paid little attention to the effects of regularity and frequency of incentives. We contrasted three ways of rewarding participants in a real-effort experiment in which individuals had to...