Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke, reports on a series of experiments he and his colleagues performed, in which they measure the incentive effects of smaller and larger bonuses.
What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?
What would you expect the results to be? When we posed this question to a group of business students, they said they expected performance to improve with the amount of the reward. But this was not what we found. The people offered medium bonuses performed no better, or worse, than those offered low bonuses. But what was most interesting was that the group offered the biggest bonus did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks.
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When I recently presented these results to a group of banking executives, they assured me that their own work and that of their employees would not follow this pattern. (I pointed out that with the right research budget, and their participation, we could examine this assertion. They weren’t that interested.) But I suspect that they were too quick to discount our results. For most bankers, a multimillion-dollar compensation package could easily be counterproductive. Maybe that will be some comfort to the boards at UBS and Goldman Sachs.
(emphasis mine)