Employers use applicant signals to help solve an asymmetric information problem in organizations. In this paper, we examine the impact of validated Dark versus Light personality traits on incentivized behaviors important to organizations: task effort, honesty, and reciprocity. A second study...

The Peter Principle states that, after a promotion, the observed output of promoted employees tends to fall. Lazear (2004) models this principle as resulting from a regression to the mean of the transitory component of ability. Our experiment reproduces this model in the laboratory by means of...

In this paper, we investigate individuals' investment in status in an environment where no monetary return can possibly be derived from reaching a better relative position. We use a real-effort experiment in which we permit individuals to learn and potentially improve their status (rank). We...

Agency theory assumes that tighter monitoring by the principal should motivate the agent to raise his effort level whereas the ?crowding-out? literature suggests that it may reduce the overall work effort. These two assertions are not necessarily contradictory provided that the nature of the...