Performance-pay, sorting and social motivation

Variable pay links pay and performance but may also help firms to attract more productive employees. Our experiment investigates the impact of performance-pay on both incentives and sorting and analyzes the influence of repeated interactions between firms and employees on these effects. We show that (i) the opportunity to switch from a fixed wage to variable pay scheme increases the average effort level and its variance, and (ii) high skill employees concentrate under the variable pay scheme; (iii) however, in repeated interactions, efficiency wages reduce the attraction of performance-pay. Social motivation and reputation influence both the provision of incentives and their sorting effect. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.