The Hidden Perils of Career Concerns in R&D Organizations
研究经济激励如何导致员工故意选择更难的任务方案，从而降低任务成功概率，并探讨了不同能力员工的策略差异及激励设计改进方向。
This research examines how certain economic incentives can lead agents to prefer difficult solutions to their organizational tasks that reduce their likelihood of obtaining a successful task outcome. Drawing on the career concerns literature, I model a decision context in which agents have the operational autonomy to choose among different solutions. Analyzing this model reveals that agents with career concerns will, under certain conditions, deliberately reduce their likelihood of succeeding with a task by choosing a solution that makes their task more difficult. These findings suggest that highly capable agents prefer moderately difficult tasks to showcase their capability, while less-capable agents prefer highly difficult tasks to mask their lack of capability. The robustness of these results is examined in various extensions. Furthermore, the paper provides insights on how incentives can be designed to alleviate this problem.