Incentives in Business and Academia

Bertil Holmlund

No 2009:9, Working Paper Series from Uppsala University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper discusses some issues of compensation policy in business and academia from the perspectives of incentive theory, other theories, and empirical research. The main conclusion is that mechanical rules for performance-related pay are likely to be inferior to more subjective performance evaluation criteria. Formalized performance pay, where pay is directly linked to measures of output, can easily have dysfunctional effects, especially when some dimensions of performance are easier to observe than others. Subjective performance evaluation is not perfect, but it is probably the best method to obtain a holistic assessment of multidimensional performance indicators.

Keywords: compensation policy; performance-based pay; incentive theory. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J30 J33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Date: 2009-06-09

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nek.uu.se/Pdf/wp20099.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:uunewp:2009_009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Uppsala University, Department of Economics
Address: Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P. O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Katarina Grönvall ().