the effect of cognitive moral development on honesty in managerial reporting this study examines whether truth telling in the form of honest reporting is associated with cognitive moral development conventional agency theory assumes that people are self interested and willing to tell a lie to increase their personal payoffs while recent empirical evidence shows that some people give up monetary rewards to tell the truth e g evans et al account rev 76 537 559 2001 the social psychology literature suggests that cognitive moral development influences individuals ethical decisions we carried out an experiment whereby participants submitted managerial reports in which truth telling decreased their monetary payoff despite the fact that their decisions were not subject to monitoring auditing or reputation effects some participants reported honestly or partially honestly we find the relationship between honest reporting and cognitive moral development to be both positive and linear compared with those at lower stages of cognitive moral development participants at higher stages of cognitive moral development were more likely to submit an honest report and give up potential monetary gains from lying we further examine the economic impact of honest reporting on the firm s profit with the assumption of self interest and profit maximization antle and eppen manag sci 31 163 174 1985 suggest that a contract with a hurdle rate feature reduces managers information rent we find that in comparison with the expected outcome of a hurdle contract the firm can yield higher profits with a trust contract by hiring managers with a p score higher than 16 67

stable near rational sunspot equilibria abstract we introduce a new class of solutions to nonlinear forward looking models called near rational sunspot equilibria nrse nrse are natural nonlinear extensions of the usual sunspot equilibria associated with the linearized version of the economy and are near rational in that agents use the optimal linear forecasting model when forming expectations generic results for existence and stability under learning are established nrse in indeterminate nonlinear models are found to be stable under learning provided that the corresponding linearized model s minimal state variable solution is e stable nrse are readily computable and our results make it possible to use the standard linear tools to search for stable nrse we illustrate our results using a canonical nonlinear new keynesian model

nominal price rigidity money supply endogeneity and business cycles abstract this paper investigates the ability of nominal price rigidity to explain the co movement of inflation with the cyclical component of output observed in the post war u s data a dynamic general equilibrium model is constructed with the introduction of monopolistic competition and nominal price rigidity in a standard real business cycle model allowing for an endogenous money supply rule it is then demonstrated that sticky price models can explain the observed associations between movements in inflation and output much better than flexible price models this result depends little on whether money supply is assumed to be endogenous or not

income money ethic pay satisfaction commitment and unethical behavior is the love of money the root of evil for hong kong employees this study examines a model involving income the love of money pay satisfaction organizational commitment job changes and unethical behavior among 211 full time employees in hong kong china direct paths suggested that the love of money was related to unethical behavior but income money was not indirect paths showed that income was negatively related to the love of money that in turn was negatively related to pay satisfaction that in turn was negatively associated with unethical behavior pay satisfaction was positively related to organizational commitment thus the love of money is the root of evil but money is not

testing the theory of tournaments an empirical analysis of broiler production broiler chickens are raised by contract growers whose rewards depend explicitly upon relative performance we use data on the performance of broiler producers facing both tournament and linear performance evaluation compensation structures to test three predictions from the theory of tournaments that changes in the level of prizes that leave prize differentials unchanged will not affect performance that in mixed tournaments more able players will choose less risky strategies and that tournament organizers will attempt to handicap players of unequal ability or reduce mixing to avoid the disincentive effects of mixed tournaments our evidence is consistent with each prediction

the effect of published reports of unethical conduct on stock prices this study adds to the empirical evidence supporting a significant connection between ethics and profitability by examining the connection between published reports of unethical behaviour by publicly traded u s and multinational firms and the performance of their stock using reports of unethical behaviour published in the wall street journal from 1989 to 1993 the analysis shows that the actual stock performance for those companies was lower than the expected market adjusted returns unethical conduct by firms which is discovered and publicized does impact on the shareholders by lowering the value of their stock for an appreciable period of time whatever their views on whether ethical behaviour is profitable managers should be able to see a definite connection between unethical behaviour and the worth of their firm s stock stockholders the press and regulators should find this information important in pressing for greater corporate and managerial accountability

can agents with causal misperceptions be systematically fooled using data on house sales and inventories this paper shows that housing market dynamics are driven mainly by listings and less so by transaction speed thus the decision to move house is key to understanding the housing market the paper builds a model where moving house is essentially an investment in match quality implying that moving depends on macroeconomic developments and housing market conditions the endogeneity of moving means there is a cleansing effect those at the bottom of the match quality distribution move first which generates overshooting in aggregate variables the model is applied to the 1995 2004 housingmarket boom

tournaments without prizes evidence from personnel records we use a quasi experimental research design to study the effect of giving workers feedback on their relative performance the setting is a firm in which workers are paid piece rates and where for exogenous reasons management begins to reveal to workers their relative position in the distribution of pay and productivity we find that merely providing this information leads to a large and long lasting increase in productivity that is costless to the firm our findings are consistent with the interpretation that workers incipient concerns about their relative standing are activated by information about how they are performing relative to others this paper was accepted by olav sorenson organizations

on non uniqueness in rational expectations models an attempt at perspective abstract many macroeconomic models involving rational expectations give rise to an infinity of solution paths even when the models are linear in all variables some writers have suggested that this non uniqueness constitutes a serious weakness for the rational expectations hypothesis one purpose of the present paper is to argue that the non uniqueness in question is not properly attributable to the rationality hypothesis but instead is a general feature of dynamic models involving expectations it is also argued that there typically exists in a very wide class of linear rational expectations models a single solution that excludes bubble or bootstrap effects one that occur only because they are arbitrarily expected to occur a systematic procedure for obtaining solutions free from such effects is introduced and discussed in addition this procedure is used to interpret and reconsider several prominent examples with solution multiplicities including ones developed by fischer black and john b taylor

an exploration of the eductive justifications of the rational expectations hypothesis this paper examines justifications of the rational expectations hypothesis that rely on the analysis of the agents mental forecasting educing activity which involves forecasting the forecasts of others etc the corresponding concept of eductive learning stability based on the game theoretical concept of rationalizability is primarily used within the classical muth model conditions for coordination of beliefs are interpreted and discussed they are robust to the introduction of noise more generally eductive stability fits economic intuition on coordination stability increases when the industry product differentiation increases and when decisions are sequential and observable copyright 1992 by american economic association

classic promotion tournaments versus market based tournaments as initially formulated in the seminal analysis of lazear and rosen 1981 an important perspective for understanding the role of promotions in firms is the tournament perspective that is a promotion and in particular the wage increase associated with a promotion is a prize that serves as an incentive for workers to exert effort and take other actions beneficial to the firm such as the accumulation of human capital in this paper i consider whether the best way to model promotion tournaments is by having firms commit to prizes ex ante as in lazear and rosen s initial formulation or whether promotion prizes should be modeled as arising from the signaling role of promotions and the competition between firms for promoted workers

the future of personnel economics personnel economics is defined as the application of microeconomic principles to human resources issues that are of concern to most businesses the field now about 20 years old arose for three reasons first those of us who were teaching standard labour economics to business students encountered a disinterested audience business students believe that labour supply and demand unemployment investment in education and other topics which are of primary concern to labour economists are almost irrelevant to their future business careers their boredom with what we had to sell signalled that a change in the product might be warranted second the issues studied by human resources specialists were of interest to economists but the approach taken by the non economist was unsatisfying it was loose unfocused and ad hoc and lacked the general rigorous framework to which economists have grown accustomed the economist s reaction was to enter an industry where it was believed rents existed third the technology of economics changed as a result of some breakthroughs particularly those dealing with agency and contract theory economists were better equipped to tackle problems that had evaded them in the past

how much does honesty cost small bonuses can motivate ethical behavior although people generally try to avoid lying the lure of potential monetary payoffs often leads to unethical behavior the current research investigates whether small monetary rewards for honesty help people resist the temptations of larger incentives or whether they backfire and lead to even more dishonesty four experiments address these issues experiment 1 shows that a 1 bonus led people to act more honestly when they could have lied to obtain 4 an identical bonus however did not increase dishonesty experiment 2 uses a different context and again shows that a 1 bonus led people to act more honestly it also finds no evidence that this small payoff crowded out subsequent altruistic behavior experiment 3 shows that a 1 bonus increased people s honesty even when the payoffs for lying increased to 8 12 and 16 but not when the payoff for lying increased to 20 experiment 4 finds that smaller bonuses for honesty still had an impact although it tended to be somewhat weaker in addition com

institutions and performance in european labour markets taking a fresh look at evidence this paper presents a selective survey of the recent literature on labour market institutions and offers new empirical eu based evidence on the impact of labour market reforms on employment and labour market adjustment although the literature traditionally treats labour market institutions as exogenous attention shifted recently towards understanding the underlying causes of specific institutional arrangements as a consequence the literature highlights the great importance of an efficient policy design exploiting these interactions wisely and identifies general principles for achieving an efficient policy design at both macro and micro levels although empirical evidence does not show a major change in terms of intensity of labour market reform after the setting of the economic and monetary union and the creation of the euro the reforms aiming at strengthening the labour market attachment of vulnerable groups tend to have been successful both in raising their employment and increasing labour market adjustment

diagnosing measurement equivalence in cross national research many researchers have pointed out that it is necessary to ensure measurement equivalence in cross national comparative research three aspects of measurement equivalence translation metric and calibration equivalence are necessary to establish the cross national reliability and validity of items used to measure theoretical constructs this paper discusses these issues and proposes two recently developed empirical techniques multiple group lisrel and optimal scaling for use in diagnosing cross national measurement equivalence these techniques are illustrated by reanalysis of a pioneering u s and japanese study the two techniques yield convergent results indicating measurement equivalence for some but not all ordinal level items under consideration the findings demonstrate that the proposed methods are useful diagnostic tools for exploring measurement equivalence several suggestions for reducing the likelihood of problems with measurement equivalence and a number of methods for dealing with items where lack of equivalence persists are also discussed

toward an ethical theory of organizing current organizations are underpinned by utilitarian ethics of modernity pure economic motive driven organizations detach themselves from larger societal interest rising number of corporate scandals and intraorganizational income inequalities are breeding similar trends in society at large current organizations base their competitive advantage on resources and capabilities which boils down to economic supremacy at all cost whether it is named i o or rbv of the firm this theoretical article posits ethics based trust as the main competency and capability for attaining sustained competitive advantage it in no way condemns utility view of the firms but treats it as a natural yet secondary outcome of genuine ethicality of the firm cultivating an ethical culture in the firm through identifying antecedents organizational practices and the outcomes where profitability is an automatic but secondary outcome under the supremacy of ethics is detailed in the multilevel model presented in this article the main call of this article is to posit ethics and morality over and above short term profits so that organizations fulfill their trustee role for society through enacting socio humanistic theories within organizations a brief analysis of the proposed ethical theory of firm is undertaken in light of the schooling notion in the contemporary organization theory literature

executive compensation and tournament theory empirical tests on danish data this article adds to the empirical literature on tournament theory as a theory of executive compensation i test several propositions of tournament models on a rich data set containing information about 2 600 executives in 210 danish firms during a 4 year period i ask are pay differentials between job levels consistent with relative compensation is pay dispersion between levels higher in noisy environments is the dispersion affected by the number of tournament participants is average pay lower in firms with more compressed pay structures does wider pay dispersion enhance firm performance most of the predictions gain support in the data

tournament rewards and risk taking this article considers a lazear rosen tournament model where agents can influence both the spread of their output distribution risk taking and its mean the unique equilibrium induces excessive risk taking and a low level of effort by modifying the tournament to give the highest prize to the agent with the most moderate output a low level of risk taking and high level of effort can be sustained as an equilibrium the first result can be useful to understand the relative performance evaluation puzzle of executive compensation and the second result can be useful to understand puzzling workplace norms promoting mediocrity

monetary intelligence and behavioral economics across 32 cultures good apples enjoy good quality of life in good barrels monetary intelligence theory asserts that individuals apply their money attitude to frame critical concerns in the context and strategically select certain options to achieve financial goals and ultimate happiness this study explores the bright side of monetary intelligence and behavioral economics frames money attitude in the context of pay and life satisfaction and controls money at the macro level gdp per capita and micro level z income we theorize managers with low love of money motive but high stewardship behavior will have high subjective well being pay satisfaction and quality of life data collected from 6586 managers in 32 cultures across six continents support our theory interestingly gdp per capita is related to life satisfaction but not to pay satisfaction individual income is related to both life and pay satisfaction neither gdp nor income is related to happiness money makes people happy our theoretical model across three gdp groups offers new discoveries in high gdp rich entities high income not only reduces aspirations rich motivator and power but also promotes stewardship behavior budget give donate and contribute and appreciation of achievement after controlling income we demonstrate the bright side of monetary intelligence low love of money motive but high stewardship behavior define monetary intelligence good apples enjoy good quality of life in good barrels this notion adds another explanation to managers low magnitude of dishonesty in entities with high corruption perceptions index cpi risk aversion for gains of high probability tang et al 2015 doi 10 1007 s10551 015 2942 4 in low gdp poor entities high income is related to poor budgeting skills and escalated happiness these managers experience equal satisfaction with pay and life we add a new vocabulary to the conversation of monetary intelligence income gdp happiness subjective well being good and bad apples and barrels corruption and behavioral ethics

performance responses to competition across skill levels in rank order tournaments field evidence and implications for tournament design tournaments are widely used in the economy to organize production and innovation we study individual data on 2775 contestants in 755 software algorithm development contests with random assignment the performance response to added contestants varies nonmonotonically across contestants of different abilities precisely conforming to theoretical predictions most participants respond negatively whereas the highest skilled contestants respond positively in counterfactual simulations we interpret a number of tournament design policies number of competitors prize allocation and structure number of divisions open entry and assess their effectiveness in shaping optimal tournament outcomes for a designer

inflation expectations and monetary policy surprises we use monthly data across fifteen euro area economies for the period 1985 1 2015 3 to obtain monetary policy changes that can be regarded as surprises for different types of consumers a novel feature of our empirical approach is the estimation of monetary policy surprises based on changes in monetary policy that were unanticipated according to the consumers stated beliefs about the economy we go on to investigate how these monetary policy surprises affect consumers inflation expectations we find that such monetary policy surprises can have the opposite impact on inflation expectations to those obtained under the assumption that consumers are well informed about a set of macroeconomic variables describing the state of the economy more specifically when we relax the assumption of well informed consumers by focusing instead on their stated beliefs about the economy unanticipated increases in the interest rate raise inflation expectations this is consistent with imperfect information theoretical settings where unanticipated increases in interest rates are interpreted as positive news about the state of the economy by consumers that know policymakers have relatively more information this impact changes sign since the crisis

men women and competition an experimental test of behavior this study reports a series of experiments that examine outcomes when agents are able to choose between a payment scheme that rewards based on absolute performance i e piece rate and a scheme that rewards based on relative performance i e a tournament we test for the presence and persistence of gender differences in performance and the rate of entry into the tournament option and whether these differences are sensitive to the structure of the tournament rewards in the winner take all wta condition only the best performer in the tournament for each round received a payment 4 50 in the graduated tournament condition the same payment 4 50 was divided among the first second and third finishers in the tournament in the wta condition men showed significantly lower forecast errors than women in addition a clear sorting effect occurs in the wta condition in early rounds of the wta condition male entrants into the tournament show significantly lower forecast errors than female tournament entrants however the difference disappears over time after controlling for forecasting skill gender did not predict entry into the tournament for the wta condition however lower forecasting skill reduced the probability of entry in the graduated tournament the situation was reversed men entered the tournament at significantly higher rates even after controlling for skill forecasting skill had no impact on the decision to enter the tournament while the average male entrant to the tournament had lower forecast errors than the average female entrant the men entered at much higher rates as a consequence men were much more likely than women to enter the tournament too frequently

the effect of wage dispersion on team outcome and the way team outcome is produced the impact of intra team pay dispersion on team productivity is a highly discussed issue on the one hand wage differentials provide incentives for higher employee effort on the other hand pay inequality may reduce team cohesiveness and increase feelings of relative deprivation leading to lower performance analysing nonlinear effects of wage dispersion in professional soccer we find empirical evidence that team performance is strongest when there is either very high or very low wage inequality medium levels produce the weakest team performance in addition we show that the pay structure affects the team s playing style even after controlling for team and coach heterogeneity we discuss the theoretical and managerial implications as well as the limits of generalization

the 11 20 money request game a level k reasoning study we study experimentally a new two player game each player requests an amount between 11 and 20 shekels nis he receives the requested amount and if he requests exactly one shekel less than the other player he receives an additional 20 shekels level k reasoning is appealing due to the natural starting point requesting 20 and the straightforward best response operation nevertheless almost all subjects exhibit at most three levels of reasoning using two variants of the game we demonstrate that the depth of reasoning is not increased by enhancing the attractiveness of the level 0 strategy or by reducing the monetary cost of undercutting the other player

compensation and span of control in hierarchical organizations this article presents evidence on the relationship between compensation ratios and spans of control within hierarchical organizations we find that compensation ratios are lower than span of control at any position within the hierarchy which is consistent with an elasticity of compensation to a number of subordinates lower than one managers human capital endowments determine a significant part of the salary differences throughout hierarchical levels as predicted by models of talent allocation in hierarchies differences in the size of firms should be attributed more to differences in their number of hierarchical levels than to variations in the span of control

the efficiency of equity in organizational decision processes it is now widely accepted that rent seeking anne krueger 1974 or directly unproductive profit seeking jagdish bhagwati 1982 may cause inefficiencies in the context of public sector decisions the possibility that government decisions for example about taxes quotas franchises or standards may create or redistribute rents induces private parties to spend valuable resources to influence that distribution even when such expenditures carry no social benefit moreover the social cost of rent seeking can exceed the value of the resources spent trying to gain and protect rents for example because the fear of losing wealth through redistribution reduces the incentives for wealth creation treating rent seeking activities as characteristic of public sector decision processes ignores the fact that similar phenomena are to be found in firms unions and other private sector organizations our recent work milgrom 1988 our 1988 1990 papers attempts to identify the advantages of decision processes private or public that permit rent seeking and to incorporate these into a cost benefit analysis of optimal decision processes our work begins with an analysis of why rents and quasi rents arise in organizations and of the forms that the rent seeking they engender may take some measures to insulate the decision process from rent seeking such as limits on the provision of information by interested parties or restrictions on the range of options considered may degrade the quality of decisions especially by blocking the flow of valuable information optimal decision processes balance the costs of rent seeking against the value of information obtained several aspects of the rules affect the opportunities that members have to spend resources trying to alter the distribution of rents to ascertain the possibilities for rent seeking the analyst must ask questions like can the parties propose new initiatives at any time can they give volumes of testimony in a form of their own choosing can they appeal adverse decisions are decision makers obliged to respond to the parties initiatives is the range of actions that they can take in response relatively broad rather than being tightly constrained by property rights or other formal rules more affirmative answers to these questions lead to more opportunities or greater incentives for costly rent seeking as a kind of shorthand we call decision processes that have more of these elements more open processes the very elements that make a process open to rent seeking may also add flexibility and responsiveness helping to ensure that important ideas and proposals are fully considered from this perspective the benefits of openness can in principle be measured by a value of information calculation in the usual manner of statistical decision theory weighing the costs and benefits it follows that a more open process is more desirable when the rents available for redistribution are low and the value of the information that might be acquired is high conversely when the potential for redistribution is high and the value of information is low the optimal decision process is less open this kind of reasoning helps to illuminate the variations in the decision processes that are found in many organizations we have discussed a number of examples in our earlier work including the characteristics of personnel departments the contrasting patterns of decision making employment and compensation in u s and japanese firms professor of economics stanford university and jonathan b lovelace professor of economics graduate school of business stanford university stanford ca 94305 respectively this work was supported by the national science foundation

the place of the capability approach within sustainability economics the connections between the capability approach and sustainability economics have been explored recently i argue here that for engaging in a more substantive study of those connections we must first understand the place of the capability approach within the history of economic thought as a second stage of the revival of classical surplus theory once this is clear we can then use the capability approach in order to specify concepts such as well being surplus scarcity and sustainable reproduction which are essential for the development of sustainability economics

differences in managerial values a study of u s hong kong and prc managers in this study of convergence divergence of managerial values four western developed measures machiavellianism locus of control intolerance of ambiguity and dogmatism and the four dimensions of the eastern developed chinese value survey confucian dynamism human heartedness integration and moral discipline were the measures used the findings indicate that often times both culture and the business environment interact to create a unique set of managerial values in a country

managing expectations instruments vs targets should policymakers offer forward guidance in terms of a path for an instrument such as interest rates or a target for an outcome such as unemployment we study how the optimal approach depends on a departure from rational expectations people have a limited understanding of the behavior of others and of the general equilibrium ge effects of policy the bite of such bounded rationality on implementability and welfare is minimized by target based guidance if and only if ge feedbacks are strong enough this offers a rationale for why central banks should shine the spotlight on unemployment when faced with a prolonged liquidity trap a steep keynesian cross or a large financial accelerator

the relevance of epistemic analysis to sustainability economics and the capability approach abstract this paper considers how epistemic analyses birkin and polesie 2011 foucault 1970 foucault 1990a foucault 1990b may assist with the development of sustainability economics bartelmus 2010 baumgartner and quaas 2010a baumgartner and quaas 2010b and soderbaum 2011 and the capability approach ballet et al 2011 martins 2011 rauschmayer and lesmann 2011 scerri 2012 it was the french social theorist michel foucault 1926 1984 who coined the term episteme to refer to the possibility of knowledge that determines the development of thought and knowledge in a given period for foucault epistemes were the buried foundations of knowledge that his epistemic archaeology could unearth in 2007 foucault was identified as the most cited author of books in the humanities by thomson reuters isi web of science this paper begins with a brief definition and description of epistemic analyses a summary analysis of the modern episteme and neoclassical economics is then provided and this is followed by outline evidence for the emerging episteme finally the opportunity is considered for the emerging episteme to reinforce and enhance sustainability economics and the capability approach

incentives for helping on the job theory and evidence recent advances in incentive theory stress the multidimensional nature of agent effort and specifically cases where workers affect one anothers performance through helping efforts this article models helping efforts as determined by the compensation package and task allocation the model is tested with australian evidence on reported helping efforts within work groups the evidence consistently supports the hypothesis that helping efforts are reduced while individual efforts are increased when promotion incentives are strong piece rates and profit sharing appear to have little effect on helping efforts while task variety and helping efforts are positively correlated

quitters never win the adverse incentive effects of competing with superstars internal competition may motivate worker effort yet the benefits of competition may depend critically on workers relative abilities large skill differences may reduce efforts i use panel data from professional golf tournaments and find that the presence of a superstar is associated with lower performance on average golfers first round scores are approximately 0 2 strokes worse when tiger woods participates relative to when woods is absent the overall tournament effect is 0 8 strokes the adverse superstar effect varies with the quality of woods s play there is no evidence that reduced performance is attributable to media attention intensity or risky strategy adoption

inequality sustainability and piketty s capital abstract in this article i address the implications of thomas piketty s book capital in the twenty first century for our understanding of inequality and sustainability drawing upon amartya sen s capability approach and the revival of classical political economy it brings i argue that piketty s contribution is a significant one which has the potential to lead economic analysis in a more fruitful direction but its potential becomes much greater if its empirical analysis is combined with the revival of classical political economy undertaken by sen and other authors rather than with marginalist theory

the love of money satisfaction and the protestant work ethic money profiles among univesity professors in the u s a and spain this study tests the hypothesis that university professors lecturers in the u s and spain with different money profiles based on factors success budget motivator equity and evil of the love of money scale will differ in work related attitudes and satisfaction results suggested that achieving money worshipers with high scores on factors success motivator equity and budget had high income work ethic and high satisfaction with pay level pay administration and internal equity comparison but low satisfaction with external equity comparison careless money admirers high success but low budget had low intrinsic job satisfaction and low satisfaction with pay level and life apathetic money managers low evil and low motivator had the highest intrinsic job satisfaction and life satisfaction money repellent individuals high evil and low success had low income work experience work ethic and low satisfaction with pay administration money does not provide the same motivation for people in all four money profiles results are discussed in light of the effectiveness of using money to reward people with different money profiles intrinsic motivation and unethical behavior

pay equality and industrial politics personnel managers often argue that equitable pay treatment manifested as wage compression is useful because it reduces disharmony among workers but it is far from obvious that a compressed salary structure is morale improving since better workers may feel disenchanted by this scheme however when workers rewards are based on relative comparisons salary compression reduces uncooperative behavior that is detrimental to the firm relative comparisons imply that some reference group must be selected the major result is that within the relevant groups some wage compression is efficient

research notes using relative deprivation theory to explain satisfaction with income and pay level a multistudy examination this article reports four studies in which we applied relative deprivation theory to the prediction of satisfaction with income and pay level the proposed model specified both social comparisons a

the internal economics of the firm evidence from personnel data we analyze twenty years of personnel data from one firm the hierarchical structure is quite simple and stable career movements suggest that the employee s rate of learning and the firm s learning about ability are important there are promotion fast tracks exit rates vary little with tenure or salary the firm has personnel policies like those described in the internal labor markets literature although several theoretical preconditions for ilms such as ports of entry and exit are lacking job levels are important to compensation but there is also substantial individual variation in pay within levels our companion paper in this issue explores the wage policy of this firm

deficits public debt dynamics and tax and spending multipliers cutting government spending can increase the budget defi cit at zero interest rates according to a standard new keynesian model calibrated with bayesian methods similarly increasing sales taxes can increase the budget defi cit rather than reduce it both results suggest limitations of austerity measures at zero interest rates running budget defi cits can be either expansionary or contractionary depending on how they interact with expectations about long run taxes and spending the effect of fi scal policy action is thus highly dependent on the policy regime a successful stimulus therefore needs to specify how the budget is managed not only in the short but also in the medium and long runs

reconsidering pay dispersion s effect on the performance of interdependent work reconciling sorting and pay inequality pay dispersion in interdependent work settings is virtually universally argued to be detrimental to performance we contend however that these arguments often confound inequality with inequity t

a game level analysis of salary dispersion and team performance in the national basketball association using game level panel data on the national basketball association nba we examine the causal effect of within team salary dispersion on team performance we exploit three measures of salary dispersion and examine the effect at three levels whether the outcome of the game is influenced by salary dispersion among 1 players participating in the current game active players 2 players who played more than half of their team s games in a season regular and occasional players and 3 the entire player population regardless of the measures used we find that salary dispersion does not influence team performance

interpreting the capitalist order before and after the marginalist revolution in this article i compare the approaches to process and order of classical political economy and marginalist economics taking into account the implicit ontological commitments of each perspective in their explanation of capitalism i draw on the social ontology developed by tony lawson especially the notion of social positioning the classical political economists studied the capitalist economy as a process of reproduction and distribution of the economic surplus where socio economic order depends on the division of society into social classes after the marginal revolution the classical approach is definitely abandoned in a context where the analysis of human institutions in terms of social positions is progressively replaced by methodological individualism this leads to a conception where the notion of socio economic order is interpreted always in terms of market exchange between individuals and in many cases replaced with a concern with the stability of an equilibrium situation

the new keynesian cross abstract the new keynesian nk cross is a graphical and analytical apparatus for heterogeneous agent hank models expressing key aggregate demand objects mpc and multipliers as functions of heterogeneity parameters it affords analytical insights into monetary fiscal and forward guidance multipliers and replicates the aggregate implications of quantitative hank the key parameter the constrained agents income elasticity to aggregate income depends on fiscal redistribution when it is larger smaller than one the effects of policies and shocks are amplified dampened with uninsurable idiosyncratic uncertainty this translates intertemporally through compounding discounting in the aggregate euler equation into further amplification dampening of future shocks

can neuroscience inform economics rationality emotions and preference formation the interaction between neuroscience and economics has gained much prominence recently leading to the emergence of the new and expanding field of neuroeconomics i will argue that although there is much insight to be gained from the interaction between neuroscience and economics the implications of recent developments in neuroscience and neuroeconomics for the deductivist methodology of mainstream economics and its emphasis on prediction of events have not been sufficiently addressed in fact much research on neuroeconomics has contributed to the formulation of deductivist models aimed at the prediction of events when the more fruitful use of neuroscience in economics consists rather in the utilisation of its insights for the development of an explanation of social behaviour that moves beyond the mainstream deductivist methodology the somatic marker hypothesis developed by damasio and others working closely with him will be suggested as an alternative framework for conceptualising the emergence of social behaviour from a neurobiological substrate

a cross cultural comparative study of managerial job attitudes effective managerial performance is influenced by the types of rewards which managers seek in their work environment and by their perceptions of the degree to which their job expectations are being satisfied this research provides empirical evidence on the nature of job related values and outcomes in 4 countries canada france japan and the uk the survey data reveal that the types of job outcomes sought by managers differ significantly from one culture to another the results should be of practical value to companies seeking to develop more effective management motivational devices in the countries studied moreover the approach and methodology may provide a useful model for further cross cultural studies

ends in view the capabilities approach in ecological sustainability economics while traditional scientific endeavor seeks to avoid the problem ecological economics and the broader emergent field of sustainability economics e se are explicitly grounded in a particular ethico moral assertion one that defines sustainability as a normative notion about the way how humans should act towards nature and how they are responsible towards one another and future generations baumgartner and quaas 2010 p 445 thus e se is neither a purely positive science nor is it a purely normative endeavor but it is what has been called relevant science baumgartner and quaas 2010 p 447 a key objective of e se is therefore said to be to study how ecosystems and human activity interrelate in terms that extend beyond functional and descriptive analysis of this interrelationship and towards explicitly incorporating this normative vision the result that is aimed for is a discipline that is constituted as the best possible approach to the science and management of sustainability

structural estimation of rank order tournament games with private information in this article we propose and solve a game theoretic model of a rank order tournament with private information using the contract settlement data from a poultry company we estimate a fully structural model of a symmetric nash equilibrium of this game we show that growers equilibrium effort depends on four factors the spread in piece rates between the performance brackets the number of players in each tournament the number of performance brackets used and the density of growers private shocks we use estimates to simulate how changes in the tournament characteristics affecting equilibrium effort impact the growers and the integrator s welfare in most sporting events prizes are awarded not on basis of absolute performance but based on relative performance or tournaments be sides sporting events tournaments are also frequently used in labor contracts the name tournament typically suggests a rank order ordinal scheme such as is considered by lazear and rosen 1981 whereas a broader definition applies to any compensation scheme based on relative performance e g nalebuff and stiglitz 1983 tsoulouhas and vukina 1999 despite the sizeable theoretical litera ture on tournaments empirical work related to these models remains rather limited most of the theoretical literature on tournaments see mclaughlin 1988 for a survey has been con cerned primarily with the comparison of tour naments against various independent reward structures under various assumptions about risk preferences the number of participants and prizes specifications of production shocks and the asymmetry of information previous empirical work has largely focused on testing the predictions of the theoretical models this includes articles on executive compensation e g main o reilly and wade 1993 ericksson 1999 gibbons and murphy 1990 profes sional sports e g ehrenberg and bognanno

resolving new keynesian anomalies with wealth in the utility function at the zero lower bound the new keynesian model predicts that output and inflation collapse to implausibly low levels and that government spending and forward guidance have implausibly large effects to resolve these anomalies we introduce wealth into the utility function the justification is that wealth is a marker of social status and people value status since people partly save to accrue social status the euler equation is modified as a result when the marginal utility of wealth is sufficiently large the dynamical system representing the zero lower bound equilibrium transforms from a saddle to a source which resolves all the anomalies

the optimal allocation of prizes in tournaments of heterogeneous agents tournaments are widely used in organizations explicitly or implicitly to reward the best performing employees for example by promotion or bonuses and or to penalize the worst performing employees for example by demotion withholding bonuses or unfavorable job assignments these incentive schemes can be interpreted as various prize allocations based on the employees relative performance while the optimal prize allocation in tournaments of symmetric agents is relatively well understood little is known about the impact of the allocation of prizes on the effectiveness of tournament incentive schemes for heterogeneous agents we show that while multiple prize allocation rules are equivalent when agents are symmetric in their ability the equivalence is broken in the presence of heterogeneity under a wide range of conditions loser prize tournaments that is tournaments that award a low prize to relatively few bottom performers are optimal for the firm the reason is that low ability agents are discouraged less in such tournaments as compared to winner prize tournaments awarding a high prize to few top performers and hence can be compensated less to meet their participation constraints jel m52 j33 j24

monetary policy with interest on reserves abstract i analyze monetary policy with interest on reserves and a large balance sheet i show that conventional theories do not determine inflation in this regime so i base the analysis on the fiscal theory of the price level i find that monetary policy can peg the nominal rate and determine expected inflation with sticky prices monetary policy can also affect real interest rates and output though higher interest rates raise output and then inflation the conventional sign requires a coordinated fiscal monetary policy contraction i show how conventional new keynesian models also imply strong monetary fiscal policy coordination to obtain the usual signs i address theoretical controversies a concluding section places our current regime in a broader historical context and opines on how optimal fiscal and monetary policy will evolve in the new regime

the new keynesian liquidity trap abstract many new keynesian models produce a deep recession with deflation at the zero bound these models also make unusual policy predictions useless government spending technical regress capital destruction and forward guidance can raise output moreover these predictions are larger as prices become less sticky and as changes are expected further in the future i show that these predictions are strongly affected by equilibrium selection for the same interest rate path equilibria that bound initial jumps predict mild inflation small output variation negative multipliers small effects of far off expectations and a smooth frictionless limit fiscal policy considerations suggest the latter equilibria

delphic and odyssean monetary policy shocks evidence from the euro area abstract what drives the reaction of financial markets to central bank communication on the days of policy decisions we highlight the role of two factors that we identify from high frequency monetary surprises news on future macroeconomic conditions delphic shocks and news on future monetary policy shocks odyssean shocks these two shocks move the yield curve in the same direction but have opposite effects on financial conditions and macroeconomic expectations they also have a different impact on macroeconomic outcomes so that central bankers cannot infer the degree of stimulus they provide by looking at the mere reaction of the yield curve

wealth warmth and well being whether happiness is relative or absolute depends on whether it is about money acquisition or consumption abstract a central question in consumer and happiness research is whether happiness depends on absolute or relative levels of wealth and consumption to address this question the authors evaluate a finer level than overall happiness and distinguish three specific types of happiness with money with the acquisition of an item and with the consumption of an item they find that happiness with money and with acquisition is relative and that happiness with consumption can be either absolute or relative depending on whether the consumption is inherently evaluable or not including both lab and field data this research yields implications for how to increase consumer happiness from one generation to the next

expectation calculation and macroeconomic dynamics the authors establish a framework wherein agents make expectation revision decisions subject to a specified calculation technology and preferences over forecast errors the technology endows agents with correctly specified economic models but the cost of expectation calculation using these models leads to gradual and incomplete adjustment to long run rational expectation equilibrium the rational expectations hypothesis emerges as a special case of the equilibrium paths obtained in the authors framework in a natural rate model of monetary policy calculation technology gives rise to long run nonneutrality and hysteresis effects and incomplete adjustment of forecast rules causes output fluctuations to be amplified copyright 1992 by american economic association

pegging the interest rate on bank reserves a resolution of new keynesian puzzles and paradoxes abstract introducing bank reserves or money into the basic new keynesian nk model offers a resolution of nk puzzles and paradoxes the resulting models deliver local equilibrium determinacy under an exogenous interest rate on reserves and an exogenous nominal stock of reserves even for an arbitrarily small monetary friction this leads to a resolution of the forward guidance puzzle the fiscal multiplier puzzle and the paradox of flexibility as the monetary friction becomes vanishingly small the models converge to the basic nk model and serve to select a particular equilibrium of that model which also offers a resolution of the paradox of toil

how many winners are good to have on tournaments with sabotage abstract from an employer s perspective a tournament should induce agents to exert productive activities but refrain from destructive ones we experimentally test the predictive power of a tournament model which suggests that within a reasonable framework productive and destructive activities are influenced neither by the number of agents taking part in the tournament nor by the fraction of the winner prizes our results clearly confirm that sabotage in tournaments indeed occurs while tournament size has virtually no effect on behavior a balanced fraction of winner and loser prizes appears to enhance productive activities

how uncertainty and ambiguity in tournaments affect gender differences in competitive behavior abstract tournament incentives prevail in labor markets yet the number of tournament winners is often unclear to competitors while it is hard to measure how this uncertainty affects work performance and willingness to compete in the field it can be studied in a controlled lab experiment we present a novel experiment where subjects can compete against each other but the number of winners is either uncertain but with known probabilities or ambiguous with unknown probabilities for different numbers of winners we compare these two conditions to a control treatment with a known number of winners we find that ambiguity induces a significant increase in the performance of men who choose to compete while we observe no change for women men also increase their willingness to enter competition in the presence of ambiguity overall both effects contribute to men winning the tournament significantly more often than women under uncertainty and ambiguity these findings suggest that management should make tournament conditions transparent and information available in order to prevent gender disparities from increasing under uncertainty and ambiguity

dispersion in wage premiums and firm performance abstract using matched employer employee panel data we estimate measures of pay dispersion per firm year that take into account both firm and worker unobserved heterogeneity unlike research that controls only for differences in observables we find that within firm pay inequality is significantly associated to lower firm performance

a cross national assessment of the values of latin america managers contrasting hues or shades of gray we draw upon studies from the social sciences to develop and test hypotheses about similarities and differences in the importance of values among managers in 12 latin american countries using the rokeach value survey data from 1015 owner managers of small businesses indicated convergence among values relating to group interests but significant variation among values serving individual interests in addition several groups of countries were identified as culturally similar whereas brazil and mexico remained culturally discrete the results suggest that common perceptions of latin america as a culturally homogeneous region are stereotypical and incorrect and that divergence in the importance of values can explain differences in business phenomena across the region

job assignments signalling and efficiency this article analyzes a model in which information about a worker s ability is only directly revealed to the firm employing the worker other firms however use the worker s job assignment as a signal of ability three results recur throughout the analysis first wage rates tend to be more closely associated with jobs than with ability levels second there is frequently an inefficient assignment of workers to jobs i e even when a firm has complete information about a worker s output third the severity of this inefficiency tends to be negatively correlated with the level of firm specific human capital in the economy

are you satisfied with your pay when you compare it depends on your love of money pay comparison standards and culture we develop a theoretical model of income and pay comparison satisfaction with two mediators love of money and pay comparison standards examine the direct and the indirect paths of our model and treat culture the us vs spain as a moderator based on 311 professors in the us and spain we demonstrate a positive direct path and a negative indirect path our subsequent multi group analysis illustrates for american professors their direct path shows that income is directly related to high pay comparison satisfaction their indirect path reveals the following new insights professors with high income have a strong love of money orientation set their pay equity comparison standards deserved pay and other s salary significantly higher than their own salary and as a consequence have low pay comparison satisfaction for spanish professors love of money is not related to their pay comparison standards which are slightly non significantly higher than their own self reported income neither the direct nor the indirect path is significant the standardized total effect of income to pay satisfaction is positive for american professors but negligible for spanish professors are you satisfied with your pay when you compare our results demonstrate that pay comparison satisfaction depends on not only one s income but also one s love of money and pay equity comparison standards which may vary across cultures

an opposing responses test of classic versus market based promotion tournaments we use a systems based econometric method to show that classic and market based tournament models are empirically distinguishable since the role of risk differs across these models implementing the method using a large finnish worker firm matched panel we find support for classic tournaments given that promotions depend on relative performance the firm s wage structure is convex promotion probabilities are decreasing in the number of competitors performance is increasing in the wage spread and workers and firms adjust their choice variables in opposite directions when the variance of the stochastic component of worker performance changes

are low interest rates deflationary a paradox of perfect foresight analysis we argue that an influential neo fisherian analysis of the effects of low interest rates depends on using perfect foresight equilibrium analysis under circumstances where it is not plausible for people to hold expectations of that kind we propose an explicit cognitive process by which agents may form their expectations of future endogenous variables perfect foresight is justified by our analysis as a reasonable approximation in some cases but in the case of a commitment to maintain a low nominal interest rate for a long time our reflective equilibrium implies neither neo fisherian conclusions nor implausibly strong predicted effects of forward guidance

the importance of work goals an international perspective the paper probes into the basic question of what individuals seek from working results from a representative sample of the labor force in seven countries n 8192 showed that the two most dominant work goals are interesting work and good pay these were consistent internationally across different organizational levels between the genders and among different age categories

a cross national study of managerial values this study investigated cross national differences in managerial values a total of 567 managers from twelve nations participated in the study managerial values were assessed by means of rokeach s value survey factor analysis of the eighteen instrumental values included in rokeach s value survey revealed four underlying value dimensions the value dimension that included the instrumental values broadminded capable and courageous was ranked as the most important value dimension by managers from all twelve nations national differences were found on three of the four value dimensions

corporate sustainability toward a theoretical integration of catholic social teaching and the natural resource based view of the firm even though management scholars have offered several views on the process of corporate sustainability these efforts have focused mainly on the technical aspects of sustainability while omitting the fundamental role played by individual moral competences therefore previous work offers an incomplete and somewhat reductionist view of corporate sustainability in this article we develop a holistic framework of corporate sustainability in which both the moral and technical aspects of sustainability are considered we do so by integrating the ethical normative perspective of the catholic social teaching cst with the competitive view of the natural resource based view this framework highlights the importance of cst principles and ideas in developing executive moral competences such as moral sensitivity and awareness and moral cognition and motivation moral competences in turn influence the organizational selection of environmental strategies giving leaders the intrinsic motivation to promote both a longer term stance on corporate sustainability efforts and a relentless search for greener business models such strategies move the firm closer towards achieving environmental sustainability hence by bridging the individual normative ethical with the organizational implementational levels of corporate sustainability our framework provides a more realistic coherent and complete perspective on the complex process of achieving corporate sustainability

piketty and the growth dilemma revisited in the context of ecological economics 2017 elsevier b v piketty s capital has provoked considerable debate regarding inequality the existence of increasing inequality creates a challenge for ecological economics in this paper we set out some of the problems inherent in piketty s approach and how they are addressed from the point of view of ecological economics we use jackson and victor s response as a point of departure to make several points piketty s work involves an unreconciled inconsistency between his laws and the institutional context which becomes problematic when one starts to think about inevitability he simply assumes away ecological problems to make future forecasts for inequality as such his forecasts are undermined since ecological issues are fundamental to any viable future economy furthermore piketty effectively reproduces rather than contests the mainstream practice of delegating ecological issues to a sub discipline jackson and victor meanwhile focus on the mainstream economic aspect of piketty s work and construct a model to contest a model in so doing they provide an ideational response to what is also a problem of ideological frameworks though it can be important to contest an idea they inadvertently through family resemblance contribute to the reproduction of the problematic position of ecological concerns within dominant ways of conceiving economics

self selection and the efficiency of tournaments when exogenously imposed rank order tournaments have incentive properties but their overall efficiency is reduced by a high variance in performance bull schotter and weigelt 1987 however since the efficiency of performance related pay is attributable both to its incentive effect and to its selection effect among employees lazear 2000 it is important to investigate the ex ante sorting effect of tournaments this paper reports results from an experiment analyzing whether allowing subjects to self select into different payment schemes helps in reducing the variability of performance in tournaments we show that when the subjects choose to enter a tournament the average effort is higher and the between subject variance is substantially lower than when the same payment scheme is imposed sorting is efficiency enhancing since it increases the homogeneity of the contestants we suggest that the flexibility of the labor market is an important condition for a higher efficiency of relative performance pay

determinacy and identification with taylor rules the new keynesian taylor rule theory of inflation determination relies on explosive dynamics by raising interest rates in response to inflation the fed induces ever larger inflation unless inflation jumps to one particular value on each date however economics does not rule out explosive inflation so inflation remains indeterminate attempts to fix this problem assume that the government will choose to blow up the economy if alternative equilibria emerge by following policies we usually consider impossible the taylor rule is not identified without unrealistic assumptions thus taylor rule regressions do not show that the fed moved from passive to active policy in 1980

the dispersion of employees wage increases and firm performance previous studies examining intra firm wage dispersion and firm performance have focused on wage levels the authors of this study argue that for purposes of comparing wage dispersion s positive inc

monetary intelligence and behavioral economics the enron effect love of money corporate ethical values corruption perceptions index cpi and dishonesty across 31 geopolitical entities monetary intelligence theory asserts that individuals apply their money attitude to frame critical concerns in the context and strategically select certain options to achieve financial goals and ultimate happiness this study explores the dark side of monetary intelligence and behavioral economics dishonesty corruption dishonesty a risky prospect involves cost benefit analysis of self interest we frame good or bad barrels in the environmental context as a proxy of high or low probability of getting caught for dishonesty respectively we theorize the magnitude and intensity of the relationship between love of money and dishonest prospect dishonesty may reveal how individuals frame dishonesty in the context of two levels of subjective norm perceived corporate ethical values at the micro level cev level 1 and corruption perceptions index at the macro level cpi level 2 collected from multiple sources based on 6382 managers in 31 geopolitical entities across six continents our cross level three way interaction effect illustrates as expected managers in good barrels high cev high cpi mixed barrels low cev high cpi or high cev low cpi and bad barrels low cev low cpi display low medium and high magnitude of dishonesty respectively with high cev the intensity is the same across cultures with low cev the intensity of dishonesty is the highest in high cpi entities risk seeking of high probability the enron effect but the lowest in low cpi entities risk aversion of low probability cpi has a strong impact on the magnitude of dishonesty whereas cev has a strong impact on the intensity of dishonesty we demonstrate dishonesty in light of monetary values and two frames of social norm revealing critical implications to the field of behavioral economics and business ethics

the incentive effects of tournaments revisited evidence from the european pga tour this analysis of data from the 1987 european men s professional golf association pga tour strongly supports the hypothesis that the level and structure of prizes in pga tournaments influence players performance specifically players performance appears to vary positively with both the total money prizes awarded in a tournament and the marginal return to effort in the final round of play a value that varies among players largely depending on how the prize money is allocated among finishers of different ranks the authors suggest that these results together with the similar results of their earlier study of the 1984 u s men s pga tour may have implications for the design of compensation systems for certain groups of workers such as corporate executives college professors and salespeople

double overreaction in beauty contests with information acquisition theory and experiment central banks disclosures such as forward guidance have a weaker effect on the economy in reality than in theoretical models the present paper contributes to understanding how people pay attention and react to various sources of information in a beauty contest with information acquisition we show that strategic complementarities give rise to a double overreaction to public disclosures by increasing agents equilibrium attention which in turn increases the weight assigned to them in equilibrium action a laboratory experiment provides evidence that the effect of strategic complementarities on the realised attention and the realised action is qualitatively consistent with theoretical predictions though quantitatively weaker both the lack of attention to public disclosures and a limited level of reasoning by economic agents account for the weaker realised reaction this suggests that it is just as important for a central bank to control reaction to public disclosures by swaying information acquisition by recipients as it is by shaping information disclosures themselves

optimal tournament contracts for heterogeneous workers abstract we consider a rank order tournament between workers with different abilities under malcomson s self commitment property the employer optimally uses individual tournament prizes to extract rents from the workers without the self commitment property individual prizes are used to make the asymmetric competition less uneven by discriminating against the more able worker i e he is offered a lower winner prize than the less able worker in this spirit individual prizes serve as a substitute for handicaps

a note on sustainability economics and the capability approach sustainability economics attempts to reconcile efficiency criteria with those of social justice in a context of environmental concern this article aims at highlighting the fact that the capability approach offers an interesting perspective for the foundation of sustainability in economics it primarily focuses on the major role that freedom brings as a normative basis for well being and adds new insights for our understanding of human and environment relationship through the study of the constraints and opportunities that affect the individual the final section of this article asks us to reconsider our nature conservation choices by acknowledging the restrictive impact that they have on individual freedoms

environment justice and the capability approach in recent years several studies have attempted to combine the capabilities approach with sustainable development however critics have pointed out that although the capability approach takes the environment into account it has its shortcomings for not being a complete ethical theory our article attempts to go beyond these criticisms and show that the capabilities approach provides a good analytical framework for an environmental justice approach

income and quality of life does the love of money make a difference this paper examines a model of income and quality of life that controls the love of money job satisfaction gender and marital status and treats employment status full time versus part time income level and gender as moderators for the whole sample income was not significantly related to quality of life when this path was examined alone when all variables were controlled income was negatively related to quality of life when 1 the love of money was negatively correlated to job satisfaction and 2 job satisfaction was positively related to both income and quality of life income was negatively related to quality of life for full time high income and male employees when these two conditions failed to exist income was not related to quality of life for part time median or low income and female employees this model provides new insights regarding the impact of the love of money and job satisfaction on the income quality of life relationship

social comparison and performance experimental evidence on the fair wage effort hypothesis we investigate the impact of wage comparisons for worker productivity we present three studies which all use three person gift exchange experiments consistent with akerlof and yellen s 1990 fair wage effort hypothesis we find that disadvantageous wage discrimination leads to lower efforts while advantageous wage discrimination does not increase efforts on average two studies allow us to measure wage comparison effects at the individual level we observe strongly heterogeneous wage comparison effects we also find that reactions to wage discrimination can be attributed to the underlying intentions of discrimination rather than to payoff consequences

sabotage in tournaments evidence from a laboratory experiment although relative performance schemes are pervasive in organizations reliable empirical data on induced sabotage behavior are almost nonexistent we study sabotage in repeated tournaments in a controlled laboratory experiment and observe that effort and sabotage are higher for higher wage spreads additionally we find that also in the presence of tournament incentives agents react reciprocally to higher wages by exerting higher effort destructive activities are reduced by explicitly calling them by their name sabotage communication among principal and agents can curb sabotage when they agree on flat prize structures and increased output if sabotage is not possible the principals choose tournament incentives more often this paper was accepted by peter wakker decision analysis

incentives versus sorting in tournaments evidence from a field experiment existing field evidence on rank order tournaments typically does not allow disentangling incentive and sorting effects we conduct a field experiment illustrating the confounding effect students in an introductory microeconomics course selected themselves into tournaments with low medium or high prizes for the best score at the final exam nonexperimental analysis of the results would suggest that higher rewards induce higher productivity but a comparison between treatment and control groups reveals that there is no such effect this stresses the importance of nonrandom sorting into tournaments

ambiguous policy announcements we study the effects of an announcement of a future shift in monetary policy when agents face knightian uncertainty about the commitment capacity of the monetary authority households are ambiguity averse and are differentially exposed to inflation due to differences in wealth in response to the announcement of a future loosening in monetary policy only wealthy households creditors will act as if the announcement will be fully implemented due to the potential loss of wealth from the prospective policy easing and when creditors believe the announcement more than debtors their expected wealth losses are larger than the wealth gains that debtors expect hence the economy responds as if aggregate net wealth falls which attenuates the effects of the announcement we study the quantitative properties of the model in a liquidity trap after allowing for a realistic characterization of households wealth portfolio