Think Twice Before Going for Incentives: Social Norms and the Principal's Decision on Compensation Contracts
实验研究委托人选择激励合同（相对于固定工资）如何影响代理人成本报告的诚实性，发现激励合同除了激励效应和信任信号外，还会泄露社会规范信息，导致代理人更倾向于谎报成本。
ABSTRACT Principals make decisions on various issues, ranging from contract design to control system implementation. Few studies examine the principal's active role in these decisions. We experimentally investigate this role by studying how a principal's choice of an incentive contract that may discourage misrepresentation, compared to a fixed‐salary contract, affects the honesty of his or her agents’ cost reporting. Results show that, besides an incentive effect and a principal trust effect, the active choice for incentives produces a negative “information leakage” effect. When principals use incentives, their choices not only incentivize truthful reporting and signal distrust, but they also leak important information about the social norm, namely, that other agents are likely to report dishonestly. Agents conform to this social norm by misrepresenting cost information more. Our results have important practical implications. Managers must recognize that their decisions can leak information to their agents, which may produce unanticipated consequences for the social norms of the organization.