Executive bonuses

An Empirical Examination of Executive Signing Bonuses: An Incentive Mechanism*

S&P1500 firms awarded signing bonuses to a growing proportion of new top executives in recent years, with the payments averaging $2.5 million from 1992 through 2011. Examining hand-collected data on 2,301 signing bonuses during that period, we find empirical evidence corroborating the signaling and incentive roles of the payments. Our research is the first empirical study on executive signing b...

Dopamine Bonuses

Substantial data support a temporal difference (TO) model of dopamine (OA) neuron activity in which the cells provide a global error signal for reinforcement learning. However, in certain circumstances, OA activity seems anomalous under the TO model, responding to non-rewarding stimuli. We address these anomalies by suggesting that OA cells multiplex information about reward bonuses, including ...

Compensation monitor. Executive bonuses: health care takes care of its own.

Dopamine: generalization and bonuses

In the temporal difference model of primate dopamine neurons, their phasic activity reports a prediction error for future reward. This model is supported by a wealth of experimental data. However, in certain circumstances, the activity of the dopamine cells seems anomalous under the model, as they respond in particular ways to stimuli that are not obviously related to predictions of reward. In ...

Enhancing fundraising with refund bonuses

The provision point mechanism as a method of funding threshold public goods is extended with refund bonuses. Each contributor not only has his contribution refunded in the case of insufficient contributions but also receives a refund bonus proportional to his proposed contribution. As long as the refund bonus pool does not exceed the net value of the public good, in equilibrium the public good ...