Performance Pay and Multidimensional Sorting - Productivity, Preferences and Gender

This paper studies the impact of incentives on worker self-selection in a controlled laboratory experiment. Subjects face the choice between a fixed and a variable payment scheme. Depending on the treatment, the variable payment is a piece rate, a tournament or a revenue-sharing scheme. We find that output is higher in the variable pay schemes (piece rate, tournament, and revenue sharing) compared to the fixed payment scheme. This difference is largely driven by productivity sorting. In addition personal attitudes such as willingness to take risks and relative self-assessment as well as gender affect the sorting decision in a systematic way. Moreover, self-reported effort is significantly higher in all variable pay conditions than in the fixed wage condition. Our lab findings are supported by an additional analysis using data from a large and representative sample. In sum, our findings underline the importance of multi-dimensional sorting, i.e., the tendency for different incentive schemes to systematically attract people with different individual characteristics

Productivity under Group Incentives: An Experimental Study.

This paper presents an experimental examination of a variety of group incentive programs. The authors investigate simple revenue sharing and more sophisticated, target-based systems such as profit sharing or productivity gainsharing, as well as tournament-based and monitoring schemes. Their results can be characterized by three facts: (1) history matters-how a group performs in one incentive scheme depends on its history together under the scheme that preceded it; (2) relative performance schemes outperform target-based schemes; and (3) monitoring can elicit high effort from workers, but the probability of monitoring must be high and, therefore, costly. Copyright 1997 by American Economic Association.

Play To Your Strengths Managing Your Internal Labor Markets For Lasting Competitive Advantage

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A simple mechanism for the efficient provision of public goods: experimental evidence

The author reports on a series of experiments designed to investigate the factor of incentive mechanisms in the case of private provisions of public goods. In the Control treatment, there was no mechanism so that subjects faced strong free-riding incentives. In the so-called Falkinger mechanism treatment, the author implemented the Falkinger mechanism. The studies explored the impact of the mechanism in different economic environments. Results showed that the proposed incentive mechanism is very promising. Section I of the paper introduces the mechanism to be examined. Section II discusses the experimental design. Empirical results are provided in Section III, and Section IV interprets these results followed by a summary

Are Bonus Pools Driven by Their Incentive Effects? Evidence from Fluctuations in Gainsharing Incentives

Shared bonus pools, in which a worker’s bonus depends both on a worker’s share of the pool (which serves as the incentive) and on the size of the pool (which is largely outside of the worker’s control), are a common method for distributing bonus pay. Using variation in the size of the bonus pool generated by a manufacturing plant’s gainsharing plan, which varies incentives for quality and worker engagement, we evaluate the conditions under which incentives distributed from bonus pools have incentive effects. Overall, results are cautionary: the evidence suggests gainsharing’s benefits operate outside of the incentive channel, and incentives may backfire if they are too small or too diluted by group performance metrics. Lastly, we illustrate how random variation in the size of bonus pools offers researchers a powerful, readily available, and underused tool for studying how workers respond to the availability and strength of incentives.Are_Bonus_Pools_Driven_by_their_Incentive_Effects.pdf: 411 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020