This paper 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...

We present a model of how organizations manage performance measures when gaming is revealed over time. The incentive designer does not know when it selects a performance measure whether it will communicate the right behavior. Only over time does the principal find out the agent's responses and...

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...

This paper 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...

This paper studies the provision of incentives in a large government organization that is divided into independent pools of agencies. Each pool distributes performance awards to the agencies it supervises, subject to two constraints: the awards cannot be negative and the sum of the awards cannot...

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...

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...

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 behaviour is typically hidden from the...

Using a variety of data sources, the contributors explore how performance standards and incentives affect the behavior of public managers and agency employees, their approaches to service delivery, and ultimately, the outcomes for participants.

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 from...