Talking About Performance or Paying for It? A Field Experiment on Performance Reviews and Incentives

The authors thank Jordi Blanes i Vidal, Robert Dur, Florian Englmaier, Maria Guadalupe, Matthias Heinz, Eva Labro, Simeon Schudy, and Wim Van der Stede for helpful comments. Moreover, they thank participants of the fifth International Meeting on Experimental and Behavioral Social Sciences in Florence, the 11th Maastricht Behavioral and Experimental Economics Symposium in Maastricht, the Ohlstadt Workshop on Natural Experiments and Controlled Field Studies 2018, the Colloquium on Personnel Economics 2018 in Munich, the fourth INSEAD Randomized Control Trail days 2019, and the Advances with Field Experiments 2020, as well as seminar participants at the London School of Economics and Carnegie Mellon University. Jakob Alfitian, Katharina Arnhold, Sidney Block, Sophia Schneider, Caro Wegener, Julia Schmitz, and Theresa Hitzeman provided outstanding research assistance. The authors are very grateful for the assistance by the company and their staying power in working with us. No funding was received from the company, no coauthor had a financial relationship with the company, and none of results were corrected. Any errors and all opinions are the authors’ own. The University of Cologne did not have an Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the time the experiment was carried out. However, the rules of the laboratory were used to enforce an ethical standard. Moreover, the works council approved of all aspects of the experimental design serving as an IRB substitute. The experiment was registered with the ID AEARCTR-0002127.