Little is known about the effects of revealing information on relative performance during a dynamic tournament. We empirically study the impact of interim rank on risk taking and performance using data on professionals competing in tournaments for large rewards. As our data allows us to observe both the intended action and the performance of each participant, we can thus measure risk taking and...

We estimate the relation between union presence and executive compensation using a unique panel of executives in publicly listed US firms during the period 1992-2001. We find evidence that union presence is associated with lower levels of total executive compensation. We find this union effect to be primarily the result of substantially lower stock option awards, and to a lesser extent due to l...

Sabotage in Tournaments: Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment Although relative performance schemes are pervasive in organizations reliable empirical data on induced sabotage behavior is almost non-existent. We study sabotage in tournaments in a controlled laboratory experiment and are able to confirm one of the key insights from theory: effort and sabotage increase with the wage spread. Addit...

This paper shows that it is individually rational for agents in a firm to develop and exhibit status concerns. Workers are, by their choices of status concerns, able to transfer surplus from the the firm to themselves. As expected, relative concerns are shaped by the relative strengths and weaknesses of the workers in the firm. Surprisingly, a firm’s profit is reduced relative to the benchmark ...

This paper examines the use of incentive pay schemes within the financial services sector in London. Various theories of wage determination are reviewed with particular attention placed on the principal-agent literature as a framework for analysing the use of incentive pay. This is combined with case study interviews and a number of hypotheses regarding the use of bonuses. Quantitative analysis...

We manipulate workers’ perceived meaning of a job in a field experiment. Half of the workers are informed that their job is important, the other half are told that their job is of no relevance. Results show that workers exert more effort when meaning is high, corroborating previous findings on the relationship between meaning and work effort. We then compare the effect of meaning to the effect ...

Despite the crucial role played by managers in changing the functioning of labour markets in transition economies, research on the determinants of executive pay and CEO turnover in these countries is almost non-existent. The current paper aims at adding to this minuscule literature. For this purpose I make use of a unique data set containing relevant firm-manager information from the Czech and ...

This paper considers job separations in a search model with labour market matching and moral hazard. Both workers and firms value productive matches and take actions to increase match stability: firms offer a share of match surplus to provide workers with correct incentives and workers take hidden actions (effort) negatively affecting the match separation rate. Heterogenous productivity draws c...

In this paper, I compare two di¤erent approaches to model implicit contracting, the in…nite-horizon approach typically used in the literature and a …nite-horizon approach building on an adverse-selection model. I demonstrate that even the most convincing result of the in…nite-horizon approach, namely that implicit contracting is improved, if the discount rate is lowered, does not carry over to ...

The aim of this paper is to study the effects of product market competition on the explicit compensation packages that firms offer to their executives. In order to measure the net effect of competition we use two different identification strategies. The first exploits cross sectoral variation in concentration ratios and the panel nature of the dataset. The second uses as a quasi-natural experim...