ABSTRACT This field experiment investigates how different levels of aggregation in relative performance information (RPI) impact employee performance in environments with multiple tasks. We randomly assign store employees of a retail chain to three groups: RPI on overall performance (control group), RPI on separate tasks, and RPI on both overall performance and separate tasks. We do not find evidence that providing separate task RPI instead of overall RPI affects performance or effort allocation. However, providing RPI on both overall performance and separate tasks seems to reduce performance, especially in the low‐return task. This suggests that detailed RPI directs employees’ attention to the smaller benefits of low‐return tasks. We further find that only 30.5% of the employees accessed their performance reports, highlighting a distinction between providing RPI in the field and the laboratory. This study is based on a registered report accepted by the Journal of Accounting Research .

ABSTRACT We study the profit effects and interplay of two core accounting practices in a field experiment in a large retail chain. In a 2 × 2 factorial design, we vary (1) whether store managers obtain decision-facilitating information on a profit metric and (2) whether they receive performance pay based on the same metric. We find that both practices increase profits significantly. In contrast to reasoning based on standard economic theory, we do not find complementarity between both interventions. Rather, we detect evidence in line with an attention-directing role of both practices: the introduction of each raises attention to the underlying objective, which induces a countervailing substitution effect. JEL Classifications: J33; M52; C93.