Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/62446 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 6725
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We use an online real-effort experiment to investigate how bonus-based pay and worker productivity interact with workplace cheating. Firms often use bonus-based compensation plans, such as group bonuses and firm-wide profit sharing, that induce considerable uncertainty in how much workers are paid. Exposing workers to a compensation scheme based on random bonuses makes them cheat more but has no effect on their productivity. We also find that more productive workers behave more dishonestly. We explain how these results suggest that workers' cheating behavior responds to the perceived fairness of their employer's compensation scheme.
Subjects: 
bonus
compensation
cheating
dishonesty
lying
employee crime
productivity
slider task
real effort
experiment
JEL: 
C91
J33
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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