Team incentives and performance: Evidence from a retail chain

Guido Friebel (gfriebel@wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de), Matthias Heinz, Miriam Krueger and Nick Zubanov

VfS Annual Conference 2017 (Vienna): Alternative Structures for Money and Banking from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: In a field experiment with a retail chain (1,300 employees, 193 shops), randomly selected sales teams received a bonus. The bonus increases both sales and number of customers dealt with by 3%. Each dollar spent on the bonus generates $3.80 in sales, and $2.10 in profit. Wages increase by 2.2% while inequality rises only moderately. The analysis suggests effort complementarities to be important, and the effectiveness of peer pressure in overcoming free-riding to be limited. After rolling out the bonus, treatment and control shops’ performance converge, suggesting long-term stability of the treatment effect.

Keywords: management practices; randomized controlled trial (RCT); field experiment; insider econometrics; wage inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J3 L2 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (83)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/168285/1/VfS-2017-pid-3581-osp1.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Team Incentives and Performance: Evidence from a Retail Chain (2017)
Working Paper: Team incentives and performance: Evidence from a retail chain (2015)
Working Paper: Team Incentives and Performance: Evidence from a Retail Chain (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc17:168285

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2017 (Vienna): Alternative Structures for Money and Banking from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).