Revisiting the Trade-off Between Risk and Incentives: The Shocking Effect of Random Shocks?
通过实验室环境重新检验风险与激励的权衡，发现当产出噪音增大时，委托人增加固定工资、降低绩效工资，但代理人反而产出更多，且委托人收益更高，这可用非CARA效用函数或损失规避解释。
Despite its central role in the theory of incentives, empirical evidence of a trade-off between risk and incentives remains scarce. We reexamine this trade-off in a workplace lab environment and find that, in line with theory, principals increase fixed pay while lowering performance pay when the relationship between effort and output is noisier. Unexpectedly, agents produce substantially more in the noisy environment than in the baseline despite weaker incentives. In addition, principals’ earnings are significantly higher in the noisy environment. We show that these findings can be accounted for when agents maximize a non-CARA utility function or when they exhibit loss aversion. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2914 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.