Solving coordination failure with “all-or-none” group-level incentives |
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Authors: | John Hamman Scott Rick Roberto A Weber |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA;(2) The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA |
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Abstract: | Coordinating activity among members is an important problem faced by organizations. When firms, or units within firms, are
stuck in bad equilibria, managers may turn to the temporary use of simple incentives—flat punishments or rewards—in an attempt
to transition the firm or unit to a more efficient equilibrium. We investigate the use of incentives in the context of the
“minimum-effort,” or “weak-link,” coordination game. We allow groups to reach the inefficient equilibrium and then implement
temporary, flat, “all-or-none” incentives to encourage coordination on more efficient equilibria. We vary whether incentives
are positive (rewards) or negative (penalties), whether they have substantial or nominal monetary value, and whether they
are targeted to a specific outcome (the efficient equilibrium) or untargeted (apply to more than one outcome). Overall, incentives
of all kinds are effective at improving coordination while they are in place, but there is little long-term persistent benefit
of incentives—once incentives are removed, groups tend to return to the inefficient outcome. We find some differences between
different kinds of incentives. Finally, we contrast our results to other recent work demonstrating greater long-term effectiveness
of temporary incentives.
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Keywords: | Coordination Incentives Organizations Experiments |
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