Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.IZA Discussion Paper No. 6284 January 2012 ABSTRACT Who Benefits from Benefits? Empirical Research on Tangible IncentivesAlthough a broad field of literature on incentive theory exists, employer-provided tangible goods (hereafter called benefits) have so far been neglected by economic research. A remarkable exception is an empirical study by Oyer (2008). In our study, we test some of his findings by drawing on a German data set. We use two waves of the GSOEP data (2006, 2008) to analyze the occurrence of benefits and their effects on employees' satisfaction. Our results provide evidence for economic as well as psychological explanations. Looking at differences in firms' and employees' characteristics we find that cost efficiency concerns, the purpose to signal good working conditions and the aim to ease employees' effort costs are evident reasons to provide benefits. Furthermore, analyzing the impact of tangible and monetary incentives on satisfaction and employees' feeling of being acknowledged by employers, we find different motivational effects. Our results support the psychological explanation that benefits are evaluated separately from other monetary wage components and are more likely to express employers' concern for their employees and recognition of their performance. JEL Classification:C83, J32, M52

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We analyse how human resource managers and directors in German companies can become aware of the application of incentive systems like goalsetting and performance-based pay. In particular, we analyse to what extent a nudge can increase the interest of experts in goalsetting and performance-based pay. The nudge consists of giving information concerning the diffusion rate of goalsetting and performance-based pay, as well as the potential productivity increase. In fact, surveyed HR managers who received the information reported a higher interest in goalsetting and performance-based pay compared to the control group of HR managers without such information. Furthermore, the study showed a consistent answering behaviour between statements about intended activities with the performance management and statements about the actual implementation one year later.Keywords: behavioural economics, human resources, managers, compensation Behavioural Economics in OrganisationsDuring the last thirty years, business sciences have expanded their research methods and objects of investigation by insights from other domains like psychology, sociology and neurology. One important insight for managers in companies is that people are much more often guided and influenced by emotions and external factors than had been assumed so far. For example, behavioural economics research shows that fairness and inequality aversion plays an important role for performance evaluation by managers (e.g. Kampkötter & Sliwka, 2016). In general, behavioural economics research findings prove to be well reproducible. Camerer et al. (2016) conducted worldwide replications from particularly well-known behavioural economics studies, with the result that 78 percent of the research findings could be replicated and the rest of the findings just shortly missed the level of significance.Behavioural economics expands standard economic theory with psychological factors. For example, the suggestion that a human implements all available information in his decision making could not be proven by various studies (e.g. Altmann et al., 2011). In fact, in the face of cognitive limitations, he will concentrate on fewer pieces of particularly important information. Not just marketing experts take advantage of this phenomenon; election researchers also use it to motivate non-voters. For instance, Gerber and Rogers (2009) informed US citizens about the high voter participation during the last election and showed that the voter participation of these citizens was on average three percent higher compared to citizens who did not get such information. This information has this effect because most people are interested in the behaviour and activities of others and seek to imitate it. This is called herding behaviour.In this study, herding behaviour will be analysed as a causing channel of the behavioural economics treatment with human resource managers and directors, who will be called -HR-managers‖ in what follows. HR managers are a particularly interesting group to study beca...

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