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)....

It is difficult to test the prediction that future career prospects create implicit effort incentives because researchers cannot randomly “assign” career prospects to economic agents. To overcome this challenge, we use data from professional soccer, where employees of the same club face...

We conduct a laboratory experiment among male participants to investigate whether rewarding schemes that depend on work performance - in particular, tournament incentives - induce more stress than schemes that are independent of performance - fixed payment scheme. Stress is measured over the...

We conduct a laboratory experiment among male participants to investigate whether rewarding schemes that depend on work performance - in particular, tournament incentives - induce more stress than schemes that are independent of performance - fixed payment scheme. Stress is measured over the...

Performance measurement and evaluation systems are among the most common management instruments. An integral element of this process is the use of targets, typically set in appraisal interviews and formalized via written target agreements. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between...

The inclination of individuals to improve their performance when it lags behind that of others with whom they naturally compare themselves can be harnessed to optimize the individuals’ effort in work and study. In a given set of individuals, we characterize each individual by his relative...

Empirically, compensation systems generate substantial effort despite weak monetary incentives. We consider reciprocal motivations as a source of incentives. We solve for the optimal contract in the basic principal-agent problem and show that reciprocal motivations and explicit performance-based...