Many experiments indicate that most individuals are not purely motivated by material self interest, but also care about the well being of others. In this paper we examine tournaments among inequity averse agents, who dislike disadvantageous inequity (envy) and advantageous inequity (compassion)....

This contribution investigates severance payments for dismissed employees in Germany. Particularly, it responds to the following questions: Who receives severance payments? By which characteristics is the level of severance payments determined? Is overcompensation to be considered a relevant...

Individuals faced by a tournament can oftentimes not only choose their effort level, but also the risk level of their strategy. There are some theoretical contributions on risk taking in tournaments, which mainly point out disadvantages with respect to exerted effort. Empirical evidence is rare....

The internet virtually revolutionized the possibilities of employee recruiting. First of all, this contribution undertakes a description of the market. Then, advantages and possible problems of the recruitment via internet are discussed. The empirical study analyses the issues, which persons...

A main prediction of agency theory is the well known risk-incentive trade-off. Incentive contracts should be found in environments with little uncertainty and for agents with low degrees of risk aversion. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the first trade-off. Due to lack of...

The impact of wage increases on job satisfaction is explored theoretically and empirically. To do this, we apply a utility function that rises with the absolute wage level as well as with wage increases. It is shown that when employees can influence their wages by exerting effort, myopic utility...

We investigate the use of performance appraisal (PA) in German Firms. First, we derive hypotheses on individual and job based determinants of PA usage. Based on a representative German data set on individual employees, we test these hypotheses and also explore the impact of PA on performance pay...

Many firms use subjective performance appraisal systems due to lack of objective performance measures. In these cases, supervisors usually have to rate the performance of their subordinates. Using such systems, it is a well established fact that many supervisors tend to assess the employees too...

Based on two representative samples of employees, the German Socio Economic Panel and the European Social Survey, we explore the relation between certain measures of control in employment relationships (i.e. working time regulations, use of performance appraisal systems, monitoring by...

We empirically explore the relevance of risk taking behavior in tournaments. We make use of data from the NBA season 2007/2008 and measure risk taking by the fraction of three-point shots. Current heterogeneity of teams is taken into account by intermediate results. It turns out that indeed...