Ability, Career Concerns, and Financial Incentives in a Multi-Task Setting

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Brüggen
Keyword(s):  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Strategic Behavior ◽  
Career Concerns ◽  
Effort Allocation ◽  
Perceived Ability ◽  
Task Setting ◽  
Strong Focus ◽  
Ability Levels ◽  
Individual Ability ◽  
Low Ability

ABSTRACT In a laboratory experiment, I investigate the role of perceived own ability in a multi-task setting with career concerns under fixed wages and under financial incentives with a higher weight on the task measured with noise. I find that in the absence of career concerns, participants allocate effort evenly between tasks under fixed wages and allocate more effort on the task measured with noise, both irrespective of individual ability levels. However, in presence of career concerns, perceived own ability matters for effort allocation. In particular, career concerns distort effort allocation of agents with high perceived ability, whereas agents with low perceived ability show less distorted effort allocation. In the presence of career concerns, the interaction between financial incentives and perceived ability is always disordinal, which implies that low ability agents exhibit less distorted behavior under any compensation contract. A higher explicit incentives weight on the task measured with greater noise helps to balance effort allocation, but makes all agents worse off due to the strategic behavior of agents. To keep their chances on the labor market high, ability agents increase their effort allocation to the precisely measured task slightly in anticipation of a strong focus on the precisely measured task of low ability agents. These findings are in line with economic predictions and show that perceived own ability moderates the relationship between financial incentives and career concerns on effort allocation.

scholarly journals Financial incentives to work: the size of the margin between benefit and in-work incomes

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Raven
Keyword(s):  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Income Adequacy ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Iron Triangle ◽  
Strong Focus ◽  
Welfare Systems ◽  
Effective Operation ◽  
Financial Disincentives

Financial incentives to work are an important consideration for policy makers in the realm of welfare and tax policy. Dominating one corner of the classic ‘iron triangle’ used by policy advisors to illuminate trade-offs between incentives to work, income adequacy and fiscal cost, poor financial disincentives to work can contribute to ‘trapping’ people in poverty. Further, as modern welfare systems have become increasingly ‘active’, with a strong focus on work and increased independence from the state, positive financial incentives have increasingly come to be seen as an important precondition for the effective operation of the welfare safety net. 

Career-Risk Concerns, Information Effort, and Optimal Pay-for-Performance Sensitivity

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-195
Author(s):  
Qi Chen ◽  
Shane S. Dikolli ◽  
Wei Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Pay For Performance ◽  
Risk Measure ◽  
Substitution Effect ◽  
Career Concerns ◽  
Compensation Contracts ◽  
Task Setting ◽  
Performance Sensitivity ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Model Predictions ◽  
Underlying Risk

ABSTRACT Prior work has established that managers' concerns about the level of their future compensation (i.e., implicit incentives from career concerns) may substitute for explicit incentives in compensation contracts offered to the managers in a single-task setting (Gibbons and Murphy 1992). We show that the substitution effect can be weakened, and even reversed, when managers (1) exert effort, in addition to production effort, to influence information about their ability, and (2) are concerned about both the level and variability of their reputation. We also find that managerial concern about the variability of reputation can lead to the optimal pay-for-performance sensitivity increasing in the underlying risk measure, rather than decreasing in risk, as in standard incentive-risk trade-offs. We test these predictions using a large sample of CEO compensation outcomes. Results are consistent with our model predictions.

Role of Adjunct Questions and Subject Ability Levels on the Learning of Concepts from Prose

1986 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Concept Learning ◽  
High Ability ◽  
Adjunct Questions ◽  
Midwestern University ◽  
Ability Levels ◽  
Treatment Interaction ◽  
Better Than ◽  
Low Ability

This research evaluated the effects of examples used with application adjunct questions on concept learning. Subjects were 72 undergraduates at a large midwestern university. Subjects studied a passage containing either matched or unmatched application adjunct questions or no questions (regular and special instructions). The critical attributes of the to-be-learned concepts were more salient in the sets of examples and nonexamples presented in the matched questions than in the unmatched questions. Subjects took a criterion test which consisted of novel matched and unmatched application questions. The results indicated that application adjunct questions did not produce significantly higher performance on criterion questions than no-question treatments. Matched adjunct questions did, however, produce higher levels of performance on criterion questions than unmatched questions. High ability subjects performed better than low ability subjects within treatments, but there was no significant aptitude by treatment interaction.

scholarly journals Reading English as a foreign language: The interplay of abilities and strategies

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdulkhaleq Abdulhadi Al-Qahtani
Keyword(s):  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Reading Ability ◽  
Statistical Significance ◽  
Strategy Use ◽  
High Ability ◽  
Ability Level ◽  
Ability Group ◽  
Reading Abilities ◽  
Ability Levels ◽  
Low Ability

This paper investigates the preferred order of reading strategies at three ability levels by L1 Arabic learners of English in an EFL setting. Then it explores whether there was a relationship between ability level and strategy use. Ninety-two EFL college students enrolled in a reading comprehension class participated in this study. They took a TOEFL reading section to determine their reading abilities/levels, and then they completed a biographical and the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) questionnaires. Then, statistical analyses were conducted. The results showed that each ability level reported strategy use differently in terms of order and intensity. There was also a statistical significance in strategy use between the high ability and the low ability levels. The low ability level participants reported higher use of the global reading strategies than the high ability group. However, no statistical significance of association was found between reading ability and strategy use

scholarly journals Analyst Career Concerns, Effort Allocation, and Firms’ Information Environment

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (6) ◽  
pp. 2179-2224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarrad Harford ◽  
Feng Jiang ◽  
Rong Wang ◽  
Fei Xie
Keyword(s):  
Information Environment ◽  
Career Concerns ◽  
Effort Allocation

The Role of Financial Incentives and Social Incentives in Multi-Task Settings

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Brüggen ◽  
Frank Moers
Keyword(s):  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Theory Building ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Effort Level ◽  
Effort Allocation ◽  
Social Incentives ◽  
Fixed Wage ◽  
Level Of Effort ◽  
Total Effort

In this paper, we investigate the role of financial incentives and social incentives in multi-task settings where the agent makes an effort-level choice and an effort-allocation choice. We focus on a setting where these choices are not independent and an active trade-off between effort level and effort allocation exists. Social incentives play a crucial role in this trade-off. While financial incentives increase the effort level, social incentives congruent with the principal's interest mitigate the distortions in effort allocation associated with financial incentives, which improves the effectiveness of financial incentives. In a 2×2 experiment, we find that participants who receive distorting financial incentives provide significantly more total effort than participants who receive a fixed wage, but they allocate effort significantly less congruently. However, the effort-allocation distortion caused by distorting financial incentives is significantly reduced by congruent social incentives. We further find that the level of effort on the unmeasured task is not significantly different between fixed wages and financial incentives, which implies that distortions in effort allocation are driven by doing more of the measured task instead of doing less of the unmeasured task. Our findings have important implications for both theory building and organizational practices.

Prologue to the Forum: Vocabulary Across the School Grades

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne M. Adlof
Keyword(s):  
Word Learning ◽  
Vocabulary Instruction ◽  
Elementary Grades ◽  
Reading Disorders ◽  
Vocabulary Intervention ◽  
New Words ◽  
School Grades ◽  
Grade Levels ◽  
Ability Levels ◽  
Instructional Settings

Purpose This prologue introduces the LSHSS Forum: Vocabulary Across the School Grades. The goals of the forum are to provide an overview of the importance of vocabulary to literacy and academic achievement, to review evidence regarding best practices for vocabulary instruction, and to highlight recent research related to word learning with students across different grade levels. Method The prologue provides a foundational overview of vocabulary's role in literacy and introduces the topics of the other ten articles in the forum. These include clinical focus articles, research reviews, and word-learning and vocabulary intervention studies involving students in elementary grades through college. Conclusion Children with language and reading disorders experience specific challenges learning new words, but all students can benefit from high-quality vocabulary instruction. The articles in this issue highlight the characteristics of evidence-based vocabulary interventions for children of different ages, ability levels, and language backgrounds and provide numerous examples of intervention activities that can be modified for use in individual, small-group, or large-group instructional settings.

Business: The Electronic Health Record: Front Line Experience

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-22
Author(s):  
Rosemary Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Information Technology ◽  
Electronic Health Record ◽  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Health Care Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Health Record ◽  
Health Trends ◽  
Electronic Health

National legislation is in place to facilitate reform of the United States health care industry. The Health Care Information Technology and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) offers financial incentives to hospitals, physicians, and individual providers to establish an electronic health record that ultimately will link with the health information technology of other health care systems and providers. The information collected will facilitate patient safety, promote best practice, and track health trends such as smoking and childhood obesity.

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