Back to History

Fields Changed

Registration

Field Before After
Last Published February 25, 2019 10:02 PM December 18, 2025 10:28 AM
Study Withdrawn No
Intervention Completion Date February 21, 2019
Data Collection Complete Yes
Was attrition correlated with treatment status? No
Final Sample Size: Total Number of Observations 401 employees, 47 managers
Final Sample Size (or Number of Clusters) by Treatment Arms NoInfo: 205 employees, 23 managers Info: 196 employees, 24 managers
Data Collection Completion Date February 21, 2019
Keyword(s) Firms And Productivity Firms And Productivity
Public analysis plan No Yes
Building on Existing Work No
Back to top

Papers

Field Before After
Paper Abstract Economists and management scholars have argued that the scope of incentives to increase cooperation in organizations is limited as their use signals the prevalence of free-riding among employees. This paper tests this hypothesis experimentally, using a sample of managers and employees from a large company. We exogenously vary whether managers are informed about prevailing cooperation levels among employees before they can set incentives to promote cooperation. In addition, employees matched to informed managers learn that the manager could base their incentive choice on cooperation levels. We find no evidence for the hypothesized signaling effect. Having an informed manager set the incentive does not change employees’ be-liefs about the cooperativeness of others. Incentives hence have strong positive effects on cooperative beliefs, irrespective of information. The absence of the signaling effect seems related to the perception of managers’ intentions, a mitigating but understudied factor.
Paper Citation Deversi & Spantig (2023): "Incentive and Signaling Effects of Bonus Payments: An Experiment in a Company", CESifo Working Paper 10302
Paper URL https://www.ifo.de/en/cesifo/publications/2023/working-paper/incentive-and-signaling-effects-bonus-payments-experiment-company
Back to top