An explanation for motivation crowding-out phenomena is developed in a social preferences framework. Besides selfish and fair or altruistic types a third type of agents is introduced: These ‘conformists' have social preferences if they believe that sufficiently many of the others do too. When...

We study optimal incentive contracts offered to teams where team members feel a social pressure to exert similar effort levels. The team consists of two groups of agents differing in their productivity. We characterize first best and the equilibrium under agency. Regarding economic incentives,...