Tournaments are commonly used in the workplace to determine promotion, assign bonuses, and motivate personal development. Tournament-based contracts can be very effective in eliciting high effort, often outperforming other compensation contracts, but they can also have negative consequences for...

The article examines the firm's choice of incentives when workers face additional incentives (external incentives) to those provided by the firm, such as building reputation that improves the workers' prospects with other employers, or satisfaction from working well. Surprisingly, the firm might...

We explore how inherent preferences for reciprocity and repeated interaction interact in an optimal incentive system. Developing a theoretical model of a long-term employment relationship, we first show that reciprocal preferences are more important when an employee is close to retirement. At...

This paper introduces a relative performance prize scheme to best-of-N contests. We develop a theoretical model of the best-of-N contest with intermediate prizes distributed based on the players' relative performance. The model predicts that a relative performance prize scheme both increases the...

The sealed-bid k-double auction mechanism for two-person bargaining under incomplete information can be extended by providing a bonus for both traders if, and only if, an agreement is reached. Brams and Kilgour (1996) proved that there is a unique level of bonus, namely, half the difference...

We examine the effectiveness of bonuses and fines in an "inspection game" where an employer can learn the effort of a worker through costly inspection. Standard game theoretic analysis predicts that fines discourage shirking, whereas bonuses encourage shirking. In contrast, ownpayoff effects...

Fighting collusion has long been a challenge in organizations, whilst favoritism in organizations has long been attacked as one of the most important sources of workplace conflicts. This paper links the phenomena of collusion and favoritism together which seem to be irrelevant. We show that...

We experimentally investigate a repeated "inspection game" where, in the stage game, an employee can either work or shirk and an employer simultaneously chooses to inspect or not inspect. Combined payoffs are maximized when the employee works and the employer does not inspect. However, the...