EXPRESS: Contest Design for a Multi-tier Organization: Leveraging Informational Environment to Motivate Downstream Agents
研究多层级组织中，所有者如何通过策略性披露竞赛信息（如对手奖励或经理奖金）触发代理人的公平关切，促使经理提高奖励并激励代理人付出更多努力。实验表明，披露单一信息有效，但双重信息无叠加效应，且垂直公平关切（与经理奖金相关）对努力的影响强于水平公平关切（与对手奖励相关）。
This study examines contests within a multi-tier organization, where the owner offers a prize for subordinate branches to compete, and branch managers subsequently set rewards to motivate their agents. Our main goal is to explore how the owner can steer managerial decisions to better align with her overarching objectives — maximizing agent effort — without undermining managerial autonomy. Drawing on behavioral economics, we propose that the owner can strategically disclose contest-related information to agents to trigger their fairness concerns, prompting managers to voluntarily offer higher rewards and thereby motivating greater effort. Our experimental results largely support this behavioral prediction. Compared to the baseline where agents observe only their own reward, revealing one additional piece of contest information, opponent’s reward or managers’ prize, prompts managers to offer larger rewards. However, disclosing both pieces of information does not lead to a further increase in rewards. For agents, receiving a reward higher than their opponent’s boosts effort, whereas a perceived unfair reward relative to managers’ prize leads to a significant effort decline. Moreover, when agents know both the prize and opponent’s reward, the vertical fairness concern (tied to the prize) exerts a stronger influence on effort than the horizontal fair concern (based on opponent’s reward).