Beginning with Anderson, Banker, and Janakiraman (2003), a rapidly growing literature attributes the short-run asymmetric cost response to activity changes (i.e., sticky costs) as resulting from short-run managerial choices. In this paper, we are agnostic on the theory of sticky costs. Rather,...

Matching talents to tasks is an important part of job design. Organizations routinely use performance thresholds to group agents by talent. We see thresholds defined both in terms of an individual's own performance (absolute value) and in terms of peer performance (percentile). Intuition...