Publications

2023
Working Paper

The Buy-In Effect: When Increasing Initial Effort Motivates Behavioral Follow-Through

By: Holly Dykstra, Shibeal O'Flaherty and A.V. Whillans

Behavioral interventions often focus on reducing friction to encourage behavior change. In contrast, we provide evidence that adding friction can promote long-term behavior change when behaviors involve repeated costly efforts over longer time horizons. In... View Details

Keywords: Friction; Behavior; Environmental Sustainability; Transportation; Outcome or Result

November – December 1993
Comment

Comment on: 'Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work' by Alfie Kohn

By: T. M. Amabile

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives

July 2019
Article

I Know Why You Voted for Trump: (Over)inferring Motives Based on Choice

By: Kate Barasz, Tami Kim and Ioannis Evangelidis

People often speculate about why others make the choices they do. This paper investigates how such inferences are formed as a function of what is chosen. Specifically, when observers encounter someone else's choice (e.g., of political candidate), they use the chosen... View Details

Keywords: Self-other Difference; Social Perception; Inference-making; Preferences; Consumer Behavior; Prediction; Prediction Error; Decision Choices and Conditions; Perception; Behavior; Forecasting and Prediction

2004
Working Paper

Incentives vs. Control: An Analysis of U.S. Dual-Class Companies

By: Paul A Gompers, Joy Ishii and Andrew Metrick

2006
Working Paper

The Business of Free Software: Enterprise Incentives, Investment, and Motivation in the Open Source Community

By: Marco Iansiti and Gregory L. Richards

13 Aug 2019
HBS Conference

The Componential Theory of Creativity (Research): Uncovering New Skills, Experts, and Motivations in the Field

September 1997
Article

The Cost of Price Incentives: An Empirical Analysis of Motivation Crowding-Out

By: Bruno S. Frey and Felix Oberholzer-Gee

Keywords: Cost; Motivation and Incentives; Theory

2017
Working Paper

Seeking to Belong: How the Words of Internal and External Beneficiaries Influence Performance

By: Paul Green, Francesca Gino and Bradley R. Staats

In this paper, we examine how connecting to beneficiaries of one’s work increases performance and argue that beneficiaries internal to an organization (i.e., one’s own colleagues) can serve as an important source of motivation, even in jobs that—on the surface—may seem... View Details

Keywords: Prosocial Motivation; Belongingness; Motivation; Job Design; Field Experiment; Motivation and Incentives; Strategy; Job Design and Levels

SSRN

March 2012
Article

Performance Pressure as a Double-edged Sword: Enhancing Team Motivation but Undermining the Use of Team Knowledge

By: Heidi K. Gardner

In this paper, I develop and empirically test the proposition that performance pressure acts as a double-edged sword for teams, providing positive effects by enhancing the team's motivation to achieve good results while simultaneously triggering process losses. I... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Behavior; Groups and Teams; Performance

2022
Working Paper

Regulatory Incentives for Innovation: The FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation

By: Amitabh Chandra, Jennifer Kao, Kathleen Miller and Ariel D. Stern

Regulators of new products confront a tradeoff between speeding a new product to market and collecting additional product quality information. The FDA’s Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) provides an opportunity to understand if a regulator can use new policy to... View Details

Keywords: Research and Development; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Product Development

Purchase

1986
Chapter

Promise Them Anything: The Incentive Structures of Local Public Pension Plans

By: Dutch Leonard

Keywords: Compensation and Benefits; Public Sector; Government and Politics; Local Range; Motivation and Incentives

1998
Chapter

Matching Supply with Demand in Supply Chains: The Impact of Factor Markets and Mismatched Incentives

By: A. Raman

Keywords: Supply Chain Management; Motivation and Incentives

November 2011
Case

WrapItUp: Developing a New Compensation Plan

By: W. Earl Sasser Jr. and Rachel Shelton

A restaurant chain based in California offers made-to-order sandwich wraps using fresh, healthy ingredients. The founders of the company take a very active role in day-to-day business and tightly control every aspect of the restaurant operation from hiring store... View Details

Keywords: Empowerment; Middle Management; Human Resource Management; Compensation; Incentives; Motivation; Motivation and Incentives; Change Management; Business Growth and Maturation; Service Delivery; Entrepreneurship; Employees; Compensation and Benefits; Food and Beverage Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; California

Educators

Purchase

June 29, 2022
Other Article

Strategic Complexity? Using Experiments to Understand and Overcome Obfuscation

By: Michael Luca, Ginger Zhe Jin and Daniel Martin

Credit card companies must decide what product features to disclose to consumers, such as payment schedules, penalties, and fees--and also whether to present them clearly or bury them in the fine print. Firms face similar choices in settings ranging from privacy... View Details

Keywords: Obfuscation; Credit Cards; Strategic Incentives; Complexity; Agreements and Arrangements; Customers; Consumer Behavior; Financial Services Industry

Register to Read

Spring 1970
Article

EPS Growth from Financial Packaging: An Accounting Incentive in Acquisitions

By: Henry B. Reiling

Keywords: Accounting; Acquisition; Finance; Growth and Development

2012
Article

Specialization and Variety in Repetitive Tasks: Evidence from a Japanese Bank

By: B. Staats and F. Gino

Sustaining operational productivity in the completion of repetitive tasks is critical to many organizations' success. Yet research points to two different work-design-related strategies for accomplishing this goal: specialization to capture the benefits of repetition... View Details

Keywords: Motivation; Productivity; Specialization; Variety; Work Fragmentation; Boundaries; Performance Productivity; Organizations; Research; Strategy; Motivation and Incentives; Opportunities; Market Transactions; Resource Allocation; Performance; Goals and Objectives; Learning

1998
Working Paper

Do Incentives Work? The Perceptions of Senior Executives from Thirty Countries

By: Michael Beer and Nancy Katz