Dynamics of Performance-Measurement Systems

Abstract

We present a model of how organizations manage performance measures when gaming is revealed over time. The incentive designer does not know when it selects a performance measure whether it will communicate the right behavior. Only over time does the principal find out the agent's responses and then uses this additional information to update and fine-tune the incentive system. Using data from a government organization, we test the model's main prediction that the correlation between a performance measure and th…