We review the principal--agent multi-tasking literature and discuss the relevance of this literature to the implementation of performance measurement in public organizations. Arguably, the most important lesson from the literature is that performance measurement may elicit dysfunctional and...

This Paper studies the provision of incentives in a large US training organization, which is divided into about 50 independent pools of training agencies. The number and the size of the agencies within each pool vary greatly. Each pool distributes performance incentive awards to the training...

This Paper studies a particular kind of gaming response to explicit incentives in a large government organization. The gaming responses we consider occur when agents strategically report their performance outcomes to maximize their awards. An important contribution of this work is to examine...

Using data from a large, U.S. federal job training program, we investigate whether enrolment incentives that exogenously vary the ‘shadow prices’ for serving different demographic subgroups of clients influence case workers’ intake decisions. We show that case workers enroll more clients...

We describe the evolution of a performance measurement system in a government job-training program. In this program, a federal agency establishes performance measures and standards for sub-state agencies. We show that the performance measurement system's evolution is at least partly explained as...

Results from the incentive literature suggest that performance measures are often distorted, eliciting dysfunctional and unintended responses. The existence of these responses, however, is difficult to demonstrate in practice because this behavior is typically hidden from the researcher. We...

This article studies a particular kind of gaming responses to explicit incentives in a large government organization. The gaming responses we consider occur when agents strategically report their performance outcomes to maximize their awards. An important contribution of this work is to examine...

An important lesson from the incentive literature is that explicit incentives may elicit dysfunctional and unintended responses, also known as gaming responses. The existence of these responses, however, is difficult to demonstrate in practice because this behavior is typically hidden from the...