Awards: Tangibility, Self-Signaling and Signaling to Others

Jana Gallus, Sandy Campbell and Uri Gneezy

No 12393, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Awards are widely used as incentives. This paper situates awards in the broader incentives landscape and shows how the motivational value of awards can be understood through a framework that considers three sources of value: the tangible component of an award, the social signals it emits, and its self-signaling function. We identify and discuss several major characteristics of awards through the lenses of these three dimensions: the audience, scarcity, the giver’s status, and the selection process. Based on our framework, we integrate the awards literature published across economics, psychology, management, and sociology journals to elucidate what has been learned and offer a roadmap for future experimental research on awards and incentives.

Keywords: awards; incentives; self-signaling; social signaling; tangibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D91 J3 M12 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12393.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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12393

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().