Feedback and Incentives: Experimental Evidence
GATE Working Paper No. 08-12
42 Pages Posted: 30 Apr 2008 Last revised: 15 Apr 2011
There are 2 versions of this paper
Feedback and Incentives: Experimental Evidence
Date Written: April 8, 2008
Abstract
This paper experimentally investigates the impact of different pay and relative performance information policies on employee effort. We explore three information policies: No feedback about relative performance, feedback given halfway through the production period, and continuously updated feedback. The pay schemes are a piece rate payment scheme and a winner-takes-all tournament. We find that, regardless of the pay scheme used, feedback does not improve performance. There are no significant peer effects in the piece-rate pay scheme. In contrast, in the tournament scheme we find some evidence of positive peer effects since the underdogs almost never quit the competition even when lagging significantly behind, and frontrunners do not slack off. Moreover, in both pay schemes information feedback reduces the quality of the low performers' work.
Keywords: evaluation, feedback, information, laboratory experiments, peer effects, performance pay, piece rate, tournament
JEL Classification: C70, C91, J16, J24, J31, J33, M52
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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