Status and incentives

Abstract

This article introduces status as reflecting an agent's claim to recognition in her work. This is a scarce resource: increasing an agent's status requires that another agent's status be decreased. Higher‐status agents are more willing to exert effort in exchange for money; better‐paid agents would exert higher effort in exchange for improved status. The results are consistent with actual management practices: (i) egalitarianism is desirable in a static context; (ii) in a long‐term work relationship, juniors' compensation is delayed; and (iii) past performance is rewarded by pay increases along with improved status within the organization's hierarchy.

Tournament Incentives in the Field: Gender Differences in the Workplace

“…A number of recent studies argue that competition can motivate people not merely because of the chance of winning a monetary reward but also because of nonpecuniary benefits, such as perceived esteem, status, and social recognition ðMoldovanu, Sela, and Shi 2007; Auriol and Renault 2008;Besley and Ghatak 2008;Frey andNeckermann 2008Þ. Kosfeld andNeckermann ð2011Þ show experimentally that a tournament with no more at stake than an award of zero material value can have a great impact on people's performance.…”

The Effects of Student Feedback to Teachers: Evidence from a Field Experiment

“…The estimates of the average treatment e¤ect of receiving feedback on subsequent student evaluation scores are given in Table 4. The …rst column gives the results of estimating (1). The estimated average treatment e¤ect on the average student evaluation score is 0:043, which is both economically and statistically insigni…cant.…”

“…We estimate the e¤ect of receiving feedback on teachers'performance by examining students'evaluations of teachers a year later. 1 In contrast to most previous studies (Centra, 1973, being the main exception), we also investigate whether the e¤ect of feedback depends on how student evaluations di¤er from the teacher's own performance assessment on the same items. For that purpose, we collect data on teachers'self-assessed performance both before and after the experiment.…”

“…This implies that some teachers in the treatment group learn that they perform better than their direct co-workers, while others learn that they perform worse. Relative performance information may matter for the performance of teachers when they care about their status (Moldovanu et al 2007, Besley and Ghatak 2008, Auriol and Renault 2008 or when teachers want to conform to social norms (Bernheim 1994, Sliwka 2007). Our results show that the treatment e¤ect is very close to zero for teachers who perform better than their team.…”

Motivational Job Assignments

“…This paper is related to the literature on psychological work motivation, that is, work motivation that does not stem solely from monetary rewards. Examples include status (Auriol and Renault 2008;Besley and Ghatak 2008), paying (with) respect (Ellingsen and Johannesson 2007), social esteem (Ellingsen and Johannesson 2008), fairness and reciprocity (for an overview see, for example, Fehr and Falk 2002), work motivation stemming from an exogenous preference parameter (Besley andGhatak 2005, 2006;Prendergast 2007Prendergast , 2008, or, as in this paper, work motivation arising from the employee's self-efficacy (also referred to as self-confidence in Crutzen et al 2007;Ishida 2006;Be´nabou and Tirole 2003; or as worker's morale in Fang and Moscarini 2005).…”