This paper studies how firms can efficiently incentivize supervisors to truthfully report employee performance. To this end, I develop a dynamic principal-supervisor-agent model. The supervisor is either selfish or altruistic towards the agent, which is observable to the agent but not to the...

In diesem Beitrag wird untersucht, ob Vorstandsabfindungen von börsennotierten Unternehmen durch die Empfehlung 4.2.3 Abs. 4 Satz 1 des Deutschen Corporate Governance Kodex in ihrer Höhe begrenzt werden. Die Analyse umfangreicher empirischer Daten zu Entsprechenserklärungen aller...

The mission of a job does not only affect the type of worker attracted to an organisation, but may also provide incentives to an existing workforce. We conducted a natural field experiment with 267 short-time workers and randomly allocated them to either a prosocial or a commercial job. Our data...

This paper examines how corporate governance reporting corresponds to actual conduct regarding severance payment caps for prematurely departing members of companies' executive boards in Germany. For this purpose, we first evaluate the declarations of conformity for all companies listed in the...

When two or more agents compete for a bonus and the agents' productivity in each of several possible occurrences depends stochastically on (constant) effort, the number of times that are checked to assign the bonus affects the level of un-certainty in the selection process. Uncertainty, in turn,...

As firms implement tournament bonus reward schemes, mainly the idea is to introduce competition amongst their agents in the order to promote their performance. Tournaments in which agents compete for a bonus by investing effort, are frequently applied, e.g., in development races, political...

Inspired by a recent observation about an online retail company, this paper explains why a firm may find it optimal to offer an exit bonus to recent hires so as to induce self-selection. We study a double adverse selection problem, in which the principal can neither observe agents’ commitment...

Are monetary and non-monetary incentives used as substitutes in motivating effort? I address this question in a laboratory experiment in which the choice of the job characteristics (i.e., the mission) is part of the compensation package that principals can use to influence the agents' effort....

This paper studies how altruism between managers and employees affects relational incentive contracts. To this end we develop a simple dynamic principal-agent model where both players may have feelings of altruism or spite toward each other. The con- tract may contain two types of incentives for...

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...