Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/35761 
Year of Publication: 
2009
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 3959
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
The importance of fair and equal treatment of workers is at the heart of the debate in organizational management. In this regard, we study how reward mechanisms and production technologies affect effort provision in teams. Our experimental results demonstrate that unequal rewards can potentially increase productivity by facilitating coordination, and that the effect strongly interacts with the exact shape of the production function. Taken together, our data highlight the relevance of the production function for organization construction and suggest that equal treatment of equals is neither a necessary nor a sufficient prerequisite for eliciting high performance in teams.
Subjects: 
Team incentives
equity
production function
social preferences
laboratory experiment
discriminating mechanism
mechanism design
JEL: 
C92
D23
D63
J31
J33
J41
M12
M52
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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