The DOI matches its Crossref record; 43 of the 44 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Pay Enough or Don't Pay at All*
Abstract
Economists usually assume that monetary incentives improve performance, and psychologists claim that the opposite may happen. We present and discuss a set of experiments designed to test these contrasting claims. We found that the effect of monetary compensation on performance was not monotonic. In the treatments in which money was offered, a larger amount yielded a higher performance. However, offering money did not always produce an improvement: subjects who were offered monetary incentives performed more poorly than those who were offered no compensation. Several possible interpretations of the results are discussed.
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“Financial rewards can weaken or even reverse the behaviors ' social signals, because rewards may create doubt about why the person engaged in the action and decrease both motivation and actual behavior (Gneezy and Rustichini 2000).”
From Unintended reward costs: the effectiveness of customer referral reward programs for innovative products and services (2019) · cites this paper as Gneezy and Rustichini 2000
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Metadata
- Authors
- Gneezy, U., & Rustichini, A.
- Affiliations
- Boston University (US)
- ORCID
- Rustichini, Aldo
- Venue
- Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2000-08
- Volume
- 115
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 791-810
- ISSN
- 0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
- 1531-4650
- OpenAlex
- W2168112513
- Cited by
- 2,175
- References
- 44
- Citations by year
- 2026: 61 · 2025: 67 · 2024: 70 · 2023: 127 · 2022: 78 · 2021: 126 · 2020: 93 · 2019: 111 · 2018: 93 · 2017: 119 · 2016: 138 · 2015: 140 · 2014: 132 · 2013: 129 · 2012: 109
- FWCI
- 57.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- The Quarterly Journal of Economics (publishedVersion)
- Research portal (Tilburg University) (submittedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- HighWire Press Open Archive (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Accounting › Accounting and Organizational Management
- Keywords
- financial incentives, financial compensation, performance, incentive effects, non-monetary incentives, non-monotonic effects
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