Improving the effectiveness of prosocial advertising campaigns: Message strategies to increase support from less empathic individuals

Individuals with low levels of trait empathy are hesitant when it comes to helping people in need. This makes it difficult for nonprofit organizations to gain their support for prosocial advertising campaigns. An experimental study among 214 Swiss students examines what message strategies nonprofit organizations should use to increase support from less empathic people. We investigate the effects of depicting daily life situations where people in need are happy versus sad (visual message strategies) and the effects of presenting statistical versus anecdotal evidence (verbal message strategies). The results show that less empathic individuals hold more favorable attitudes toward prosocial advertising campaigns when exposed to sad daily life images and anecdotal evidence. Moreover, attitudes mediate message effects on less empathic individuals' intentions to comply with a prosocial advocacy. Overall, the study suggests that nonprofit organizations should prefer sad over happy daily life images and anecdotal over statistical evidence in prosocial advertising campaigns.     

Intelligent technology,intelligent workers: A new pedagogy for the high-tech work place

When the focus of technology is on automation, it may be reasonable to have training programs that merely teach workers the objects and actions necessary for them to respond to smart machines. However, as the OTA report clearly points out, “There is uncertainty about how current instructional programs should be revised or expanded. …” This uncertainty comes from the informating function of the technology. As one manager said: “Our competition can buy the same black boxes that we can. Our future depends on how well our people use the information generated by that technology.”When the informating quality of the technology is recognized, the importance of smart people becomes apparent. Traditional training, with its focus on objects and actions, is not enough. In the informated environment, on-line, interactive learning is necessary if people are to create new meanings out of the information generated by computer technology.A pedagogy for meaning is a collective enterprise that can unleash individual and organizational energy in an informated work place. It has implications for (1) rethinking traditional worker-training and management-education programs, (2) transforming the work place into a learning environment, (3) reconceptualizing the roles of workers and managers so that they can become partners in creating meaning, and (4) designing rewards for people who create and participate in an environment of inquiry.A pedagogy for meaning is concerned with peoples learning how to learn. A work force that has learned how to learn is one of the most important competitive levers an organization can have in an environment of ongoing technological change.     

On the effects of incentive framing on bribery: evidence from an experiment in Burkina Faso

While incentive framing has been shown to promote workers’ effort, little is known about how it affects other dimensions of the employer-employee relationship. This paper examines whether incentive framing can also influence workers propensity to engage in an activity disloyal to their employer: corruption. To do so, we conducted an experiment in which graders are offered a bribe to report a better grade. Three treatments are conducted by framing economically equivalent contracts as menus of bonuses, penalties, or bonuses and penalties. We find that graders are more corrupt when incentives are framed as a combination of bonuses and penalties, while no difference is found between the bonus and the penalty contracts. These results are inconsistent with both standard economic theory and labor reciprocity.     

Effect of emotional victim images in prosocial advertising: The moderating role of helping mode

Charities and marketers routinely incorporate images of recipients, for example victims of a flood or famine, in their prosocial advertising; however, previous literature suggests mixed results regarding the effectiveness of relying on sad versus happy images of victims. Recently, due to reactance to excessively traumatic marketing campaigns, happy victim images have been found to be more effective in eliciting prosocial behaviors. To extend this line of research, an experiment found that consumers are more willing to help when viewing advertisements featuring happy children over sad children. Moreover, helping mode moderates the relationship between victim image and helping intentions. The effect of a happy victim image is attenuated when consumers are asked to buy cause-related products rather than donate to charities. According to emotion regulation consumption theory, consumers mitigate the feeling of negative emotions by increasing their intention to buy cause-related products. Practically, the findings provide guidance on integrating victim images in prosocial advertising.     

Education,moral hazard,and endogenous growth

We build an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth driven by human capital formation. Young people differ in their innate abilities, but these differences are not known even by the individuals themselves when they are going through the process of education. So there are no adverse selection problems. The probability of successful completion of schooling depends on both innate abilities and effort level. Moral hazard arises because effort is not observable. Successful students become skilled workers while unsuccessful ones become unskilled workers. A utilitarian government that cares about income distribution within each generation transfers income from the rich (skilled workers) to the poor (unskilled ones). This is anticipated by the young pupils and reduces incentive for hard work. This results in a lower rate of graduation, and has an adverse effect on the growth rate of human capital and output. Comparative statics results across balanced growth paths are derived. The parameters of interest are the students' rate of time preference, their degree of effort aversion and the relative price of the skill-intensive consumption good.     

Performance pay and productivity of low- and high-ability workers

Existing literature has mainly focused on analyses of the overall effect of a change in the incentive scheme. Lazear (Lazear, E., 2000, “Performance pay and productivity”, American Economic Review, 90, 1346–1361.), for example, estimates the average increase in productivity after a firm switches from an hourly-wage scheme to a piece-rate plus basic-wage scheme. His paper does not, however, account for the fact that many workers remained within the basic-wage range after the change was made in the incentive scheme. In the present paper we explore how the incentive effect might have been different for those workers seeking the basic wage, and those workers seeking the piece-rate component of the wage. Interestingly, the change in productivity is approximately the same in percentage terms for both types of workers.     

Incentive compatible reward schemes for labour-managed firms

We consider a simple case of team production, where a set of workers have to contribute a single input (say labour) and then share the joint output amongst themselves. Different incentive issues arise when the skills as well as the levels of effort expended by workers are not publicly observable. We study one of these issues in terms of a very simple model in which two types of workers, skilled and unskilled, supply effort inelastically. Thus, we assume away the problem of moral hazard in order to focus on that of adverse selection. We also consider a hierarchical structure of production in which the workers need to be organised in two tiers. We look for reward schemes which specify higher payments to workers who have been assigned to the top-level jobs when the principal detects no lies, distribute the entire output in all circumstances, and induce workers to revel their true abilities. We contemplate two scenarios. In the first one, each individual worker knows only her own type, while in the second scenario each worker also knows the abilities of all other workers. Our general conclusion is that the adverse selection problem can be solved in our context. However, the range of satisfactory reward schemes depends on the informational framework.     

The relationship between perceived compensation,organizational commitment and job satisfaction: the case of Mexican workers in the Korean Maquiladoras

Expatriate literature has generally favoured home country factors to understand expatriate success. In this paper, we contribute to the field by shifting our focus to the host country workforce (HCW). We use equity theory to examine the effects of perception gaps in compensation between HCW and expatriates on organizational commitment and its impact on job satisfaction and job performance. Based on field surveys and in-depth interviews of Korean expatriates as well as Mexican workers, results provide support for our hypothesis that significant perception gaps exist in compensation. The finding that compensation gap was significantly related to affective commitment only is of crucial importance. Our results also suggest that only affective commitment is positively related to job satisfaction and performance. We discuss research as well as managerial implications.     

Group versus Individual Performance Pay in Relational Employment Contracts when Workers are Envious

I compare group to individual performance pay when workers are envious and performance is nonverifiable. Avoiding payoff inequity, the group reward scheme is optimal as long as the firm faces no credibility problem. The individual reward scheme may, however, become superior albeit introducing the prospect of unequal pay. This is due to two reasons: Group incentives are relatively low‐powered compared to individual incentives, requiring higher incentive pay and impeding credibility of the firm. Moreover, with individual rewards, the firm benefits from the incentive‐strengthening effect of envy, allowing for yet smaller overall incentive pay and further softening the credibility constraint. I also show that contracts combining both individual and group rewards are often optimal, depending on the firm's credibility problem. These contracts include joint and relative performance pay schemes.     

Structuring incentives to elicit work effort during the process of industrialization: evidence from Vietnamese businesses

Industrial advancements in developing economies have brought with them the primacy of discretionary tasks over simple tasks in production. Differing characteristics of these separate types of tasks may require distinct incentive mechanisms to elicit work effort from employees. Using the data collected from 954 blue-collar production workers, this study examines changes in incentive mechanisms with industrial advances by testing the relative validity of major motivation models between low- and high-skill industries in Vietnam. Our results indicate that the gift exchange model gains ascendancy over the mainstream economic model as developing economies upgrade their industrial structures.     

绩效考核和激励制度对员工努力的影响

本文采用实验研究的方法,研究绩效考核和激励制度结合对雇员努力的强度和努力的持久度的影响.研究结果表明,绩效指标与奖惩挂钩可以提高对应的绩效指标的业绩.激励制度可以有效提高雇员努力的持久度,但是对努力的强度并没有明显的提升.     

Organizational Control and Work Effort – Another Look at the Interplay of Rewards and Motivation

Providing rewards is a central element of organizational control systems. However, the literature is hardly helpful from a practitioner's perspective: it typically focuses on monetary rewards at the expense of non-monetary, affiliative rewards, and yet researchers disagree over the usefulness of the prior ones. Some scholars claim that monetary rewards merely replace task-related (‘intrinsic’) motivation by reward-induced external pressure (‘extrinsic’ motivation). Empirical findings are mixed, partially given the different conceptualizations of intrinsic motivation. We shed more light on the impact of both monetary and non-monetary, affiliative rewards on the willingness to exert work effort and a potential detrimental interaction with different forms of intrinsic motivation. Our experimental results suggest that monetary and affiliative rewards have different effects: affiliative rewards clearly have beneficial effects, whereas the picture for monetary rewards is more nuanced than typically assumed in literature.     

Competitive pressures on China: Income inequality and migration

How would perfect competition affect the distribution of income in China? To answer this question, we integrate the two main streams of income distribution theory, namely the functional and the personal income approaches. First, using a general equilibrium model of China comprising 30 sectors and 27 provinces, marginal productivities are used as competitive commodity prices and factor rewards. Second, the rewards are imputed to households using their compositions in terms of persons and factor endowment entitlements. The ensuing distribution is contrasted with the status quo. Less skilled labor would stand to lose and, therefore, inequality would mount. Skilled workers, managers and technicians would move from Western and Central China to Eastern China. These flows would be more than offset by a flow of unskilled labor from Eastern China to Central China. Our finding that Eastern China has too many unskilled workers, relative to the competitive benchmark, suggests that the Harris–Todaro mechanism operates in China. Competition would change the predominant nature of inequality from the rural–urban divide to differences between the social classes. Moreover, the existing negative relationship between development and inequality would evaporate.     

Incentives Management During Privatization: An Agency Perspective

abstract    This paper explains, through a field study and from an agency perspective, how monitoring and incentive alignment mechanisms change to support the interests of a privatized firm's new ownership. In this case, privatization led to important changes in the board of directors and to more formal performance evaluation and compensation systems for top managers, as profitability and financial control gained relevancy with the firm ownership change. Our results show that differences in incentives management before and after privatization are due to different agency relations in the two periods. We also argue that in a privatization framework the relation between monitoring and incentive alignment mechanisms is complex, not simply substitutive as agency theory would predict, and this finding allows us to refine and extend agency theory for this specific context.     

经理人组合报酬激励契约模型研究

经理人报酬激励制度是现代企业激励机制的重要组成部分,现代经理人的报酬激励具有多种实现形式。为了激励经理人的有效行为,利用最优报酬契约经济理论构建了一个包含短期激励以及长期激励的财务性组合报酬契约模型,以及分析非财务性报酬对经理人行为选择的影响,是十分必要的,尤其是对我国国有企业经理人报酬激励制度优化问题,应该是很好的借鉴。     

Equity‐based incentive contracts and behavior: Experimental evidence

Equity ‐ based incentive contracts provide managers with dual incentives, motivating both effort and fraud. We report the results from an experiment in which manager subjects make effort and fraud decisions that affect a firm's value. The main treatment variable is the incentive contract, which can be of either the simple equity or stock option type. We find that both effort and fraud are increasing in a manager's share of equity and decreasing in the strike price of an option. Interestingly, the stock option contract induces relatively more fraud than the simple equity contract, even though the two induce the same effort.     

Incorporating a “no claim bonus” in insurance agency contract

A bonus received by an agent from an insurer when the insured does not make a claim is called a “no claim bonus” (NCB). An NCB rewards the agent's risk‐management (RM) effort that reduces the probability that the insured suffers a loss. This paper designs an incentive compatible contract that induces the agent to choose an RM effort. If the agent's RM effort cost is lower than a threshold, feasible ranges of NCB and premium values exist such that the insurer can offer an incentive compatible agency contract with an NCB that is acceptable to the agent.     

Achieving excellence--creating customer passion

Customers are the lifeblood of any organization. Without them, it loses its meaning and purpose. Customers provide incentive, vitality, and growth. Serving them well requires a customer-focused culture and a customer-friendly system. It also requires unrelenting effort toward continuous improvement, but the rewards are well worth the effort: unflinching customer loyalty, sustainable growth, and impressive performance.     

Temporary contracts and employee effort

Temporary contracts provide employers with a tool to screen potential new employees and have been shown to provide “stepping stones” into permanent employment for workers. For both reasons, workers on temporary contracts have an incentive to provide more effort than permanent employees. Using indicators for unpaid overtime work and absences taken from the Swiss Labor Force Survey (SLFS), we present evidence that temporary workers indeed provide higher effort than permanent employees: Their probability of working unpaid overtime exceeds that of permanently employed workers by 60%. We show the heterogeneity of this effect across different types of temporary contracts, investigate differences between men and women, and discuss the relevance of endogenous selection into temporary employment.     

总分公司体制下保险公司合谋问题的激励研究

大型中资保险公司由于其庞大的总分公司结构，在总公司、内审部门与分公司间所形成的三层委托代理关系下常出现合谋现象。本文在利用多重委托代理模型的基础上，分析了合谋问题在大型保险公司的具体表现，以及不同状态下的激励水平。最终得出结论，大型保险公司中合谋问题存在并且严重，而最优激励水平应该是平衡报酬和惩罚。