Feedback and incentives: Experimental evidence

Tor Eriksson, Anders Poulsen () and Marie Claire Villeval

Labour Economics, 2009, vol. 16, issue 6, 679-688

Abstract: This paper experimentally investigates the impact of different pay schemes and relative performance feedback policies on employee effort. We explore three feedback rules: no feedback on relative performance, feedback given halfway through the production period, and continuously updated feedback. We use two pay schemes, a piece rate and a tournament. We find that overall feedback does not improve performance. In contrast to the piece-rate pay scheme there is some evidence of positive peer effects in tournaments since the underdogs almost never quit the competition even when lagging significantly behind, and front runners do not slack off. But in both pay schemes relative performance feedback reduces the quality of the low performers' work; we refer to this as a "negative quality peer effect".

Keywords: Tournament; Piece; rate; Peer; effects; Feedback; Evaluation; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (202)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927-5371(09)00098-0
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Feedback and incentives: Experimental evidence (2009)
Working Paper: Feedback and Incentives: Experimental Evidence (2008)
Working Paper: Feedback and Incentives: Experimental Evidence (2008)
Working Paper: Feedback and Incentives: Experimental Evidence (2008)
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:eee:labeco:v:16:y:2009:i:6:p:679-688

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().