We investigate the effects of organizational culture and personal value orientations on performance under individual and team contest incentives. We develop a model of regard for others and in-group favoritism predicting interaction effects between organizational culture and personal values in...

We study optimal incentive contracts with multiple agents when performance is evaluated by a reviewer. The reviewer may be biased in favor of the agents, but the degree of bias is unknown to the principal. We show that a contest, which is a contract in which the principal fixes a set of prizes...

We study optimal incentive contracts with multiple agents when performance evaluation is delegated to a reviewer. The reviewer may be biased in favor of the agents, but the degree of the bias is unknown to the principal. We show that a contest, which is a contract in which the principal...

We analyze relational contracts for a set of agents when either (a) only aggregate output or (b) individual outputs are observable. A team incentive scheme, where each agent is paid a bonus for aggregate output above a threshold, is optimal in case (a). The team's efficiency may increase...

Economic theory suggests that performance pay may serve as an effective screening device to attract productive agents. The existing evidence on the self-selection of agents is largely limited to job tasks where performance is driven by routine, well-defined procedures. This study presents...

To test and replicate the superstar effect reported by Brown (2011) we empirically study contests where a single entrant has an endogenously higher probability of winning. Unlike the previous literature, we test for the presence of the superstar effect in several different contexts. Ultimately,...

It is difficult to test the prediction that future career prospects create implicit effort incentives because researchers cannot randomly “assign” career prospects to economic agents. To overcome this challenge, we use data from professional soccer, where employees of the same club face...