When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

Empirical and experimental papers find that high-powered incentives may reduce performance rather than improve it; a phenomenon referred to as "choking under pressure". We show that competition for high ability workers nevertheless leads firms to offer high bonus payments, thereby deliberately...