Publications

SSRN

February 2008
Case

EFI, Inc. (A)

By: David B. Godes and Lauren Barley

EFI has a unique sales compensation challenge. They cannot allocate sales credit for their core product to individual salespeople. So, they've historically paid the sales force as a team. This has worked out fine, since they've been a near-monopoly seller of a single... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Compensation and Benefits; Performance Evaluation; Groups and Teams; Salesforce Management; Motivation and Incentives

February 2008
Supplement

EFI, Inc. (B)

By: David B. Godes and Lauren Barley

This is a follow-on case to EFI, Inc. (A). It reports on Dean Mills' decision to implement a new compensation approach that pays 25% of salespeople's bonus, based on their individual sales of software add-on products. He also recommends making public each salesperson's... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Salesforce Management; Compensation and Benefits; Information Technology Industry

2011
Working Paper

Do U.S. Market Interactions Affect CEO Pay? Evidence from UK Companies

By: Joseph J. Gerakos, Joseph D. Piotroski and Suraj Srinivasan

This paper examines the extent that interactions with U.S. markets impact the compensation practices of non-U.S. firms. Using a sample of large U.K. companies, we find that the total compensation of U.K. CEOs is positively related to the extent of the firm's... View Details

Keywords: Globalized Markets and Industries; Corporate Governance; Executive Compensation; Management Practices and Processes; Motivation and Incentives; United Kingdom; United States

01 Aug 2007
Op-Ed

Company Town: Fixing Corrupt Governments

African villages, store owners paint Coca-Cola signs on the sides of their tin shacks. These signs are not sanctioned or paid for by the company. They are seen by locals as a sign of credibility. Companies and nonprofits have stronger View Details

Keywords: by Eric Werker

12 Jul 2010
Research & Ideas

Rocket Science Retailing: A Practical Guide

within stores. Align incentives within your organization and in the supply chain. Use technology judiciously and pay attention to emerging new technologies, whose value might still not be apparent. Explain... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Retail; Auto

01 May 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, May 1, 2018

happiness and well-being and how a government could go about encouraging happiness. The UAE in effect implemented a complex incentive scheme with the aim of coordinating attempts to increase happiness and well-being. The connection... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Article

How to Really Motivate Salespeople

By: Doug J. Chung

Much of what we believe about the best ways to compensate and motivate the sales force is based on theory and lab experiments. But in the past decade, researchers have been moving out of the lab and into the field, analyzing companies' sales and pay data, and... View Details

Keywords: Compensation; Motivating People; Motivation and Incentives; Compensation and Benefits; Sales

26 Aug 2009
Op-Ed

Where Cash for Clunkers Ran Off the Road

first time? Hardly likely, because auto loans still aren't readily available and many poorer people would buy a better quality used car rather than a new car. Used car prices poor people have to pay are now higher thanks to the compulsory... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch; Auto

Article

Third-Party Punishment as a Costly Signal of High Continuation Probabilities in Repeated Games

By: Jillian J. Jordan and David G. Rand

Why do individuals pay costs to punish selfish behavior, even as third-party observers? A large body of research suggests that reputation plays an important role in motivating such third-party punishment (TPP). Here we focus on a recently proposed reputation-based... View Details

Keywords: Direct Reciprocity; Evolution; Dispersal; Cooperation; Trust; Reputation; Game Theory

September 2003 (Revised January 2005)
Case

Bridges to Excellence: Bringing Quality Health Care to Life

By: Richard M.J. Bohmer, Ingrid Marie Nembhard and Robert Galvin

General Electric launched Bridges to Excellence Diabetes Care Link, a program through which enrolled physicians receive bonuses of up to 10% of their salary for delivering quality care to diabetic patients covered by a participating employer or health plan. A day... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Motivation and Incentives; Programs; Ethics; Quality; Moral Sensibility; Service Delivery; Compensation and Benefits; Health Industry

07 Apr 2008
Research & Ideas

The Debate over Taxing Foreign Profits

a plan to curb foreign tax havens and end tax breaks for "companies that ship jobs overseas" in May, 2009.) One heated issue is the charge that the U.S. tax code provides incentives for companies to ship jobs overseas. It's... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

January 2002 (Revised August 2004)
Case

Massachusetts Financial Services

By: Brian J. Hall and Jonathan Lim

This case describes the compensation and performance evaluations at an investment management company. The senior management team of Massachusetts Financial Services (MFS) Investment Management was contemplating an introduction of hedge funds at the firm, but many... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Organizational Culture; Performance Evaluation; Management Teams; Compensation and Benefits; Financial Services Industry; Massachusetts

12 Jun 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, June 12, 2018

Moneylender Debt in India and the Philippines By: Karlan, Dean, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Benjamin Roth Abstract—A debt trap occurs when someone takes on a high-interest rate loan and is barely able to pay back the interest, and thus... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

16 Dec 2014
First Look

First Look: December 16

growth, and the estate tax. The treatment has large effects on views about inequality but only slightly moves tax and transfer policy preferences. An exception is the estate tax-informing respondents of the small share of decedents who View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2010
Chapter

The Impact of Employer Matching on Savings Plan Participation under Automatic Enrollment

By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian

Existing research has documented the large impact that automatic enrollment has on savings plan participation. All the companies examined in these studies, however, have combined automatic enrollment with an employer match. This raises a question about how effective... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Consumer Behavior; Personal Finance; Investment Funds; Microeconomics; Compensation and Benefits

07 Aug 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Financial vs. Strategic Buyers

Keywords: by Marc Martos-Vila, Matthew Rhodes-Kropf & Jarrad Harford

March 1995
Case

Donald Salter Communications, Inc.

By: Stuart C. Gilson and Jeremy Cott

A new CEO is hired to manage the turnaround of a family-owned newspaper publisher. In a departure from previous management, he implements a new compensation scheme that explicitly ties executive pay to market-value-based measures of firm performance. Because the... View Details

Keywords: Family Business; Transformation; Asset Management; Wages; Balanced Scorecard; Family Ownership; Motivation and Incentives; Valuation; Journalism and News Industry

05 Dec 2011
Research & Ideas

It’s Alive! Business Scholars Turn to Experimental Research

very rational view of people, and workers were almost considered like widgets." —Ian Larkin For instance, Norton and several other researchers ran an experiment at a large American amusement park, documented in the paper Paying to be... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

November 2006
Article

The Flattening Firm: Evidence from Panel Data on the Changing Nature of Corporate Hierarchies

By: Raghuram G. Rajan and Julie Wulf

Using a detailed database of managerial job descriptions, reporting relationships, and compensation structures in over 300 large U.S. firms, we find that firm hierarchies are becoming flatter. The number of positions reporting directly to the CEO has gone up... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Location; Change; Business Ventures; Compensation and Benefits; Rank and Position; Wages; Motivation and Incentives; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Jobs and Positions; United States

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