Designing compensation plans with an appropriate level of incentives is a key decision faced by managers of direct sales forces. The authors use data on individual salesperson compensation contracts to show that firms design their pay plans to both discriminatingly select, (i.e., attract and...

Using contests to generate innovation has and is widely used. Such contests often involve offering a prize that depends upon the accomplishment (effort). Using an all-pay auction as a model of a contest, we determine the optimal reward for inducing innovation. In a symmetric environment, we find...

If managers bargain with workers over wage before choosing output in a Cournot duopoly, owners face two conflicting interests in designing managerial incentives: one for profit orientation to reduce wage, and the other for sales orientation to gain in output competition. The net effect depends...

Paying a fixed amount of money to participants in choice-based conjoint (CBC) studies is the industry standard. Recently, Ding (2007) has shown that a lottery incentive scheme outperformed a fixed fee incentive scheme when predicting out-of-sample choices. We achieve two research goals in the...

We examine the role personal compensation incentives of CMOs and CEOs play in inducing myopic marketing management. We find that CEO equity incentives are largely unrelated to the incidence and severity of myopic marketing management. CMO equity compensation, on the other hand, is highly...

To generate downstream sales, manufacturers often spend both effort and compensation when working with their dealers. Existing theories are inconclusive about the interdependent role of the two kinds of instruments in motivating dealer effort; that is, whether they are substitutes or...

The paper broadens the focus of empirical research on salesforce management to include multitasking settings with multidimensional incentives, where salespeople have private information about customers. This allows us to ask novel substantive questions around multidimensional incentive design...

We theorize peer awards’ effects on the volume and novelty of creative user-generated content (UGC) produced at online platform communities. We then test our hypotheses via a randomized field experiment on Reddit, wherein we randomly and anonymously assigned Reddit’s Gold Award to 905...

Word-of-mouth, referral, or viral marketing is a highly sought-after way of advertising. We undertake a field experiment that compares incentive mechanisms for encouraging social media shares to support a given cause. Our experiment takes place on a website set up to promote a fundraising drive...