We investigate the salesforce compensation strategy of a firm selling products in a category that several consumers find technically sophisticated, such as electronics or financial products with legal fine print. Consumers are unable to judge the value difference between a baseline product and a...

Sales contests are commonly used by firms as a short-term motivational device to increase salespeople's efforts. Conceptually, sales contests and piece-rate schemes, such as salary, commission, or quotas, differ in that in sales contests payment to salespeople is based on relative rather than...

Much of the salesforce compensation literature has focused on developing incentive schemes to maximize effort levels on the part of the salesforce. The amount of effort to expend in the selling task is considered to be the sole decision variable for a sales representative. In this paper, we...