Chief executive officer (CEO) compensation is defined as the sum of base pay, bonuses, stock grants, stock options, other forms of compensation and benefits. Inflation?adjusted, median total CEO compensation in the United States almost tripled between 1992 and 2000, with grants of stock options...

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...

This experiment compares the performance of two contest designs: a standard winnertake- all tournament with a single fixed prize, and a novel proportional-payment design in which that same prize is divided among contestants by their share of total achievement. We find that proportional prizes...

The paper reviews and discusses the literature on the concept of incentive in management; the visions of ancient Greek philosophers, classical economists, scientific management, agency theory, contracts, property theory and transaction costs theory. The discussion shows that the transaction...

A real effort experiment is investigated in which supervisors have to rate the performance of individual workers who in turn receive a bonus payment based on these ratings. We compare a baseline treatment in which supervisors were not restricted in their rating behavior to a forced distribution...

Microfinance institutions serve a majority of female borrowers. But do men and women benefit from same credit conditions? This paper investigates this issue by presenting an original model and testing its predictions on an exceptional database including 34,000 loan applications from a Brazilian...

The empirical literature on the effect of dispersion of executive remuneration (i.e., the intensity of a tournament structure) on the comparative performance of companies is mixed. Studies on US data tend to find strong positive effects but non-US studies tend to fail to find an effect. This...

Labor turnover creates longer term career concerns incentives that motivate employees in addition to the short term monetary incentives provided by the current employer. We analyze how these incentives interact and derive implications for the design of incentive contracts and organizational...

Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...