Cream-Skimming, Parking and Other Intended and Unintended Effects of Performance-Based Contracting in Social Welfare Services

In a growing number of countries, the delivery of social welfare services is contracted out to private providers, and increasingly, using performance-based contracts. Critics of performance-based incentive contracts stress their potential unintended effects, including cream-skimming and other gaming activities intended to raise measured performance outcomes. We analyze the incentive effects of performance-based contracts, as well as their impacts on provider job placement rates, using unique data on Dutch cohorts of unemployed and disabled workers that were assigned to private social welfare providers in 2002-2005. We take advantage of variation in contract design over this period, where procured contracts gradually moved from partial performance-contingent pay to contracts with 100%-performance contingent reward schemes, and analyze the impact of these changes using panel data that allow us to control for cohort types and to develop explicit measures of selection into the programs. We find evidence of cream-skimming and other gaming activities on the part of providers but little impact of these activities on job placement rates. Overall, moving to a system with contract payments fully contingent on performance appears to increase job placements for more readily employable workers, although it does not affect the duration of their jobs.social welfare, performance contracting

Total reaction cross sections from 141^{141}141Pr(α\alpha,α\alpha)141^{141}Pr elastic scattering and α\alpha-induced reaction cross sections at low energies

Elastic scattering data for $^{141}$Pr($\alpha$,$\alpha$)$^{141}$Pr have been analyzed to derive a new energy-dependent local potential for the $^{141}$Pr-$\alpha$ system. This potential is used successfully to predict the cross section of the $^{141}$Pr($\alpha$,n)$^{144}$Pm reaction at low energies where new experimental data have become available very recently. Contrary to various global potentials, this new potential is able to reproduce simultaneously elastic scattering data around and above the Coulomb barrier and reaction data below the Coulomb barrier for the $^{141}$Pr-$\alpha$ system. Reasons for the partial failure of the global potentials are explained by intrinsic properties of the scattering matrix and their variation with energy. The new local potential may become the basis for the construction of a new global $\alpha$-nucleus potential.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, Phys. Rev. C, accepte

Team incentives in public organisations; an experimental study

Using a simple production game, we investigate whether public firms perform better when they increase the power of their workersââ¬â¢ incentive schemes. In a laboratory experiment, subjects choose between a ‘public firm’ and a ‘private firm’ with team and individual incentives, respectively. When exposed to individual incentives, workers in the public firm increase effort in one parametrisation, but show a decrease in another. One reason for the latter observation is that reciprocators self-select in the public firm, rendering cooperation profitable.