This paper studies wage structure characteristics and their incentive effects within one firm. Based on personnel records and an employee survey, we provide evidence that wages are attached to jobs and that promotions play a dominant role as a wage determinant. We furthermore show that a...

The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between intrinsic job-related motivators and hotel employees' work engagement and to examine how it may correlate with important employees' outcomes, such as the prescribed-role and extra-role customer service. The literature review...

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...

By enriching a principal-agent model it is shown that the introduction of monetary incentives may reduce an agent's motivation. In a first step, we allow for the possibility that some agents stick to unverifiable agreements. The larger the fraction of reliable agents, the lower powered will then...

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...

We report three repetitions of Falk and Kosfeld's (2006) low and medium control treatments with 364 subjects. Each repetition employs a sample drawn from a standard subject pool of students and demographics vary across samples. Our results largely conflict with those of the original study. We...

This note reports a replication study of Falk and Kosfeld’s (2006) medium control treatment. In the experimental game, an agent has an endowment of 120 experimental currency units and decides how much to transfer to a principal. For every unit that the agent gives up, the principal...

By enriching a principal-agent model it is shown that the introduction of monetary incentives may reduce an agent’s motivation. In a first step, we allow for the possibility that some agents stick to unverifiable agreements. The larger the fraction of reliable agents, the lower powered will...

Empirical studies of the principal-agent relationship find that extrinsic incentives work in many instances, linking rewards to performance increases effort, but that they can also backfire, reducing effort. Intrinsic motivation, the internal drive to work to master a skill or to improve one's...

We examine the influence of different compensation schemes on exertion of effort for differentiated tasks. The first type of task is assumed to be boring and has no intrinsic motivation, while the second is assumed to be interesting, and has a higher intrinsic motivation. The results are as...