Feedback and Incentives: Experimental Evidence

Tor Eriksson, Anders Poulsen () and Marie Claire Villeval

No 3440, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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; peer effects; piece rate; tournament; performance pay; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 C91 J16 J24 J31 J33 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2008-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cta, nep-exp and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - revised version published in: Labour Economics, 2009, 16 (6), 679-688

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Related works:
Journal Article: Feedback and incentives: Experimental evidence (2009)
Working Paper: Feedback and incentives: Experimental evidence (2009)
Working Paper: Feedback and Incentives: Experimental Evidence (2008)
Working Paper: Feedback and Incentives: Experimental Evidence (2008)
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