The Comprehensive Effects of Sales Force Management: A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Selection, Compensation, and Training
构建了一个综合模型，分析销售人员对薪酬、招聘/解雇和培训等管理工具的行为反应，通过实地验证揭示固定与可变薪酬的权衡、培训替代薪酬的作用、高绩效销售人员的潜在弊端，以及离职方案对销售队伍重组的影响。
This study provides a comprehensive model of an agent’s behavior in response to multiple sales management instruments, including compensation, recruiting/termination, and training. The model takes into account many of the key elements that constitute a realistic sales force setting: allocation of effort, forward-looking behavior, present bias, training effectiveness, and employee selection and attrition. By understanding how these elements jointly affect agents’ behavior, the study provides guidance on the optimal design of sales management policies. A field validation, by comparing counterfactual and actual outcomes under a new policy, attests to the accuracy of the model. The results demonstrate a tradeoff between adjusting fixed and variable pay; how sales training serves as an alternative to compensation; a potential drawback of hiring high-performing, experienced salespeople; and how utilizing a leave package leads to sales force restructuring. In addition, the study offers a key methodological contribution by providing formal identification conditions for hyperbolic time preference. The key to identification is that under a multiperiod nonlinear incentive system, an agent’s proximity to a goal affects only future payoffs in nonpecuniary benefit periods, providing exclusion restrictions on the current payoff. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing.