The plasma protein fibronectin is an important opsonin in wound repair and host defense. To better understand the process of fibronectin-mediated phagocytosis, we have transfectod K562 cells, which endogenously express 0~5fll, with a,f13. In these transfectants, antibodies to t~fl3 block phagocytosis of fibronectin-opsonized beads completely, even though half the ingestion occurs through endoge...

Choosing to Compete: How Different Are Girls and Boys? Using a controlled experiment, we examine the role of nurture in explaining the stylized fact that women shy away from competition. Our subjects (students just under 15 years of age) attend publicly-funded single-sex and coeducational schools. We find robust differences between the competitive choices of girls from single-sex and coed schoo...

This paper reviews the use of performance monitoring in the UK public sector, excluding its use in health care. Our focus is on finding robust evidence that evaluates the success of the introduction of performance monitoring in terms of its impact both on behaviour and on final outcomes. We begin with a general discussion of performance monitoring (hereafter PM), before considering the nature o...

This paper examines under what circumstances the market-based compensation scheme is effective in inducing managers’ incentives. We combine the optimal contract theory with the market microstructure literature and endogenize both the optimal compensation scheme and the stock market equilibrium. We analytically show that the incentive pay works better in a more efficient (or more informative) st...

Tournaments are widely used in organizations, explicitly or implicitly, to reward the best-performing employees, e.g., through promotion or bonuses, and/or to punish the worst-performing employees, e.g., through firing or unfavorable job assignments. We explore the impact of the allocation of prizes on the effectiveness of tournament incentive schemes. We show that while multiple prize allocati...

We estimate the relation between union presence and executive compensation using a unique panel of executives in publicly listed US firms during the period 1992-2001. We find evidence that union presence is associated with lower levels of total executive compensation. We find this union effect to be primarily the result of substantially lower stock option awards, and to a lesser extent due to l...

We explore the behavior of losers of promotion tournaments after the tournament is concluded. We do so through the use of an experiment in which we vary the design of the promotion tournament to determine how tournament design affects post tournament effort. We provide a theoretical model demonstrating two possible effects from the tournaments which are strategic sabotage and the possibility th...

Sabotage in Tournaments: Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment Although relative performance schemes are pervasive in organizations reliable empirical data on induced sabotage behavior is almost non-existent. We study sabotage in tournaments in a controlled laboratory experiment and are able to confirm one of the key insights from theory: effort and sabotage increase with the wage spread. Addit...

This paper analyzes the performance consequences of employee stock options for a broad sample of firms during the period 1996-1999. Our tests are performed separately for the top-5 executives and all other employees. We estimate the expected level of option incentives based on each firm’s economic characteristics. We examine the association between the unexpected level of option incentives and ...

We study whether boards of directors concentrate on performance near compensation Ž . decision times rather than providing consistent incentives for chief executive officers CEO throughout the fiscal year. We show empirically that managers can profit by moving sales revenue among fiscal quarters. Though this may suggest that boards use short-term trends when determining rewards, we find evidenc...