Titel
Performance contests and merit pay with empathic employees
Autor*in
Yingchao Zhang
Business School, Durham University
Abstract
This paper studies the behavioral responses of employees who are endowed with empathic abilities to different institutional designs of incentive pay. Empathic abilities motivate altruistic behavior by sensing the other's feelings toward oneself. In performance contests, empathic individuals withhold effort, most (less) strongly when facing a non-empathic (empathic) contestant. Effort levels of both non-empathic and empathic individuals increase with a higher probability that the contestant is of their own type. By developing a theoretical model, our analysis contributes to understanding observed individual behavior in experiments and corresponding econometric evidence. With direct merit pay, effort choices only depend on the signaling quality of the performance measure. Individuals with stronger empathic abilities may shy away from performance contests to, instead, receive merit pay. If gender governs empathic abilities, setting incentives by performance contests cannot simultaneously ensure equal pay and equal opportunities.
Stichwort
Management of Technology and InnovationManagement Science and Operations ResearchStrategy and ManagementBusiness and International Management
Objekt-Typ
Sprache
Englisch [eng]
Persistent identifier
DOI
Erschienen in
Titel
Managerial and Decision Economics
Band
45
Ausgabe
1
ISSN
0143-6570
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Seitenanfang
353
Seitenende
372
Publication
Wiley
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Zugänglichkeit
Rechte
Rechteangabe
© 2023 The Authors
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