Promotion Signals,Experience, and Education

This paper uses a nation‐wide representative survey of employees to examine whether more informative job promotions carry larger wage increases. In job assignment models with asymmetric information, unexpected promotions send a signal to the external labor market to revise upward their assessment of a worker's ability. The employing firm must then increase wages to prevent the worker from being bid away. Less educated workers are assumed to come from a group with lower average ability. Their promotion is hypothesized to induce a larger positive update of the assessment of their ability than the promotion of more educated workers. Promotions of less experienced workers, with less known about their abilities, should also result in strong signaling effects. We obtain regression results consistent with our hypotheses, although the size and significance of the estimates hinge on the promotion definition. Inexperienced workers gain more from promotions that entail new managerial responsibilities, whereas less educated workers gain more from nonmanagerial promotions. This sensitivity to the definition of promotion suggests that promotions reveal information on different dimensions of ability for different types of workers.     

Incentives and Selection in Promotion Contests: Is It Possible to Kill Two Birds with One Stone?

This paper investigates whether a designer can improve both the incentive provision and the selection performance of a promotion contest by making the competition more (or less) dynamic. A comparison of static (one‐stage) and dynamic (two‐stage) contests reveals that this is not the case. A structural change that improves the performance in one dimension leads to a deterioration in the other dimension. This suggests that modifications of the contest structure are an alternative to strategic handicaps. A key advantage of structural handicaps over participant‐specific ones is that the implementation of the former does not require prior identification of worker types. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE EFFECTS OF EXPANDING THE GENEROSITY OF THE STATUTORY SICKNESS INSURANCE SYSTEM

This article evaluates an expansion of employer‐mandated sick leave from 80% to 100% of forgone gross wages in Germany. We employ and compare parametric difference‐in‐difference (DID), matching DID and mixed approaches. Overall workplace absences increased by at least 10% or 1 day per worker per year. We show that taking partial compliance into account increases coefficient estimates. Further, heterogeneity in response behavior was of great importance. There is no evidence that the increase in sick leave improved employee health, a finding that supports a shirking explanation. Finally, we provide evidence on potential labor market adjustments to the reform. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimal promotions of competing firms in a frictional labour market with organizational hierarchies

We study optimal promotion decisions of hierarchical firms, with one junior and one senior managerial position, which interact in a search and matching labour market. Workers acquire experience over time while being employed in a junior position and the firm has to determine the experience level at which the worker receives a promotion which allows her to fill a senior position. Promoted workers move to the senior position in their current firm, if it is vacant, otherwise they search for senior positions on the market. The promotion cut-offs of the competing firms exhibit strategic complementarity, but we show that generically a unique stable symmetric general equilibrium exists. We find that stronger competition among firms leads to later (earlier) promotions if the initial number of firms is small (large) giving rise to an inverse U-shape relationship. In the presence of two skill groups, stronger competition among firms reduces the importance of skill differences, so the gap in wages and promotion times decreases with the number of firms. The model is compatible with empirical evidence that high-skill workers are promoted faster than the low-skilled and that internal promotions are more frequent than cross-firm moves to a higher hierarchical position.     

Performance Pay and Offshoring

In this paper, we construct a North–South general equilibrium model of offshoring, highlighting the nexus among endogenous effort‐based labor productivity and the structure of wages. Offshoring is modeled as international transfer of management practices and production techniques that allow Northern firms to design and implement performance compensation contracts. Performance–pay contracts address moral hazard issues stemming from production uncertainty and unobserved worker effort. We find that worker effort augments productivity and compensation of those workers assigned to more offshorable tasks. An increase in worker effort in the South, caused by a decline in offshoring costs, an increase in worker skill, or a decline in production uncertainty in the South, increases the range of offshored tasks and makes workers in the North and South better off. An increase in Southern labor force increases the range of offshored tasks, benefits workers in the North, and hurts workers in the South. International labor migration from low‐wage South to high‐wage North shrinks the range of offshored tasks, makes Northern workers worse off and Southern workers (emigrants and those left behind) better off. Higher worker effort in the North, caused by higher worker skills or lower degree of production uncertainty, decreases the range of offshored tasks and benefits workers in the North and South.     

Wage Differentials and Workers’ Effort: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

We organize a real-effort field experiment with varying piece rates to assess the impact of wages and social comparisons on productivity. In addition to analyzing how piece rates and social comparisons affect productivity during the ‘paid stage’ of the experiment, we also consider how they affect effort supply during a voluntary and unpaid follow-up task. Our main results are that effort supply is relatively unresponsive to variation in own earnings, but responds strongly to pay inequality. While we obtain weak support for the hypothesis that positive social comparisons invite extra effort during paid stages of the experiment, our most important finding is that social comparisons matter for voluntary tasks when shirking is cheap. Specifically, positive social comparisons positively affect productivity during unpaid tasks, and negative comparisons have the opposite impact.     

Peer pressure and social comparisons with heterogeneous ability

When workers' efforts are not contractible, we investigate whether the display of workers' efforts to coworkers influences wage and effort decisions. We find that employers mainly increase the wages offered to the more valuable workers when they are observed that increases the difference in wages in such setting. We find evidence of peer pressure and strategic complementarity in efforts. Additionally, low‐ability workers are more sensitive to peer pressure than their more productive coworkers, and these workers exert less effort with increases in the reciprocity of their coworkers. Finally, the display of workers' efforts to coworkers is detrimental to the employer's payoff but enhances efficiency.     

Trading off learning and performance: Exploration and exploitation at work

Employees are increasingly given control over how they learn, and their choices for training are diverse and varied, yet employees must balance competing demands. On one hand, they are expected to be increasingly efficient in their current job duties – on the other hand, they are expected to develop new skills and competencies that enable them to adapt and respond to changing job demands. Drawing from the organizational learning literature, we propose a model of worker and work characteristics that inform choices between two mindsets related to learning at work. The first mindset is exploration, or the pursuit of learning outside one’s current knowledge domain; the second mindset is exploitation, the refinement/deepening of one’s existing knowledge stock focusing on the task at hand. We further propose that these strategic choices, or trade-offs, influence employee learning and performance in unique ways, with different implications for both routine and adaptive performance. Finally, we incorporate the notions of feedback loops and risk assessments that influence ongoing decisions between exploration and exploitation mindsets. Recommendations for future research and extensions of the theoretical model are also proposed.     

引入自有品牌的供应链激励机制设计研究

针对引入自有品牌的供应链激励机制设计问题,首先在对称信息和非对称信息下建立由两个制造商和一个零售商组成的供应链激励机制模型,接着分析引入自有品牌的供应链激励机制均衡结果,最后对自有品牌引入前后的均衡结果进行比较。通过分析发现,零售商在制造商品牌上的努力水平始终不超过其在自有品牌上的努力水平;在对称信息下,零售商引入自有品牌肯定会使制造商受到损失,而在非对称信息下制造商可能会从中获利。     

Efficient Contests

In their seminal contribution, Lazear and Rosen (1981) show that wages based upon rank induce the same efficient effort as incentive‐based reward schemes. They also show that this equivalence result is not robust toward heterogeneity in worker ability, as long as ability is private information because it is not possible to structure contests to simultaneously satisfy self‐selection constraints and first‐best incentives. This paper demonstrates that efficiency can be achieved by a simple modification of the prize scheme in a mixed (heterogenous) contest where contestants learn their type after entry. If contestants know their type before entering the contest, rent extraction becomes an issue. Implications for optimal contest design are also explored. Finally, the relationship between effort maximizing contests and profit maximizing contests are discussed.     

Credibility and Monitoring: Outsourcing as a Commitment Device

We analyze an environment plagued by double moral hazard where the agent’s effort level and the principal’s precision in monitoring are not contractible. In such an environment, the principal tends to over‐monitor thereby inducing low effort. To ease the latter problem, the principal may choose to increase monitoring costs by outsourcing the activity. As a result equilibrium monitoring is reduced and incentives become more powerful. This choice is particularly likely when the worker’s effort is an important factor in determining output.     

销售人员学习的前因及其与销售绩效的关系研究

随着环境日益复杂多变,销售人员的学习对于个人的销售绩效的提升乃至组织的成功都起着至关重要的作用。销售人员学习包括学习努力与系统知识两个不同的维度。其前因变量包括个人层面的主动性、经验开放性和学习导向;任务层面的工作自主度和任务难度;组织层面的学习氛围和管理支持。销售人员学习对销售绩效的影响则是通过减少角色模糊、提升自我效能感和工作满意度来实现的。     

Can asymmetric punishment deter endogenous bribery

This paper studies the effects of asymmetric punishment of bribery on both bribery and compliance with regulations. The bribe amount is decided via Nash bargaining and regulatory compliance and whistle-blowing are strategic decisions. Moreover, investigations of bribery and noncompliance occur in a manner that may be interdependent. We show that, under symmetric punishment, inducing whistle-blowing has no effect on the frequency of bribery. When the bribery and noncompliance investigations are independent, a switch from symmetric to asymmetric punishment either makes no difference or induces more nonharassment bribery. Only when bribery detection increases the chance of noncompliance detection and asymmetric punishment leads to whistle-blowing for both types of entrepreneurs, can the shift succeed in reducing noncompliance. The result is robust to the case where legalization of bribe-giving is not feasible for nonharassment bribes.     

Worker absence and shirking: Evidence from matched teacher-school data

We utilise a unique matched teacher-school data set of absenteeism records to quantify the impact of group interaction on the absence behavior of primary and secondary teachers. To address problems of identification our study focuses on teachers who move between schools. The estimates for movers suggest that absenteeism is influenced by prevailing group absence behaviour at the school. Our finding suggests that a worker takes one more day of absenteeism if their average coworker takes 12 more days or 8 more days absenteeism per quarter for primary school and secondary school teachers, respectively. We interpret this as evidence that worker shirking is influenced by workplace absence norms.     

Corporate social responsibility: The implications of cost improvement and promotion effort

We investigate the interaction of these two strategic decisions when corporate social responsibility (CSR) is incorporated into supply chain partners' decisions. Our results show that, with a noncooperative CSR scenario, the upstream manufacturer is more aggressive in investing in innovation to reduce production costs, which strategically lowers the wholesale price to retailers, and the downstream retailer is also less reluctant to engage in more promotion efforts to induce demand in comparison with a cooperative CSR scenario. Furthermore, the customer's sensitivity to promotion effort may hurt the CSR level of each party.     

Strategic HRM and organisational learning in the Chinese private sector during second-pioneering

This study examines the relationship between strategic human resource management (HRM) and organisational learning in Chinese private firms during the second-pioneering stage, which involves a process of transition from ‘opportunism’ to ‘capability building’. It specifically examines how this relationship is influenced by environmental uncertainty and guanxi dependence. Using data from a face-to-face survey of 107 Chinese private firms, the findings show that strategic HRM has a positive effect on all four dimensions of organisational learning: knowledge acquisition, knowledge distribution, knowledge interpretation and organisational memory. In addition, task environmental uncertainty positively moderates the relationship between strategic HRM and organisational learning. However, the moderating effects of institutional environmental uncertainty and guanxi dependence on this relationship are not significant. These results highlight the importance of strategic HRM for organisational learning in uncertain task environments to promote organisational transition.     

Play Hard,Shirk Hard? The Effect of Bar Hours Regulation on Worker Absence

The regulation of alcohol availability has the potential to influence worker productivity. This paper uses legislative changes in bar opening hours to provide a potential quasi‐natural experiment of the effect of alcohol availability on working effort, focusing on worker absenteeism. We examine two recent policy changes, one in England/Wales and one in Spain that increased and decreased opening hours respectively. We demonstrate a robust positive causal link between opening hours and absenteeism, although short‐lived for Spain. The effect is long lasting for the UK where we provide evidence which suggests that increased alcohol consumption is a key mechanism.     

Job mobility and careers in firms

This paper presents a theoretical model that combines employers learning about worker productivity, human capital acquisition, job-assignment and resolution of worker uncertainty regarding disutility of work from a job, to show how widely documented findings on both wage and promotion dynamics and turnover can be captured in a single set-up. Specifically we show how our model can capture results such as; probability of turnover decreases with labor market experience, wage changes during job changes is more in earlier periods, serial correlation in wages and probability of promotion increases in wages, amongst others.     

Practical POMDP-based test mechanism for quality assurance in volunteer crowdsourcing

ABSTRACT

In volunteer crowdsourcing, tasks are published via an open call and completed by many workers without reward. Under the traditional volunteer crowdsourcing paradigm, workers with diverse levels of reliabilities are chosen indiscriminately; moreover, each worker’s performance may change over the time. Thus, the quality of task completions is a key concern in volunteer crowdsourcing. To improve the task completion quality (i.e. the accuracy of task answers), we adopt an adaptive test task (with a true answer) insertion approach to detect a worker’s performance dynamically, thereby ensuring that normal tasks (with unknown true answers) are assigned when this worker is currently deemed reliable via testing. To decide when to route test tasks to detect a worker’s performance or assign normal tasks to be completed in a high quality state, we proposed a Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) based test mechanism without any complicated parameter estimation, which is more practical for real-world volunteer crowdsourcing applications. In addition, we also designed rejection strategies to reject malicious workers and dubious answers. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate that the proposed test mechanism performs better in the accuracy of task answers, compared with benchmark methods.     

Promotion Tournaments and Individual Performance Pay

We analyze the optimal combination of promotion tournaments and linear individual performance pay in an employment relationship. An agent's effort is nonobservable and he has private information about his suitability for promotion. Thus, the two incentive schemes need to be combined to serve both incentive and selection purposes. If harder working agents respond less to intensified effort incentives, we find that the principal puts less emphasis on individual performance pay when selection becomes more important. Thus, we provide a possible explanation as to why, in practice, individual performance pay is less prevalent than promotion‐based incentives.