This article studies a particular kind of gaming responses to explicit incentives in a large government organization. The gaming responses we consider occur when agents strategically report their performance outcomes to maximize their awards. An important contribution of this work is to examine whether this behavior diverts resources (e.g., agents’ time) from productive activities or whether it simply reflects an accounting phenomenon. We evaluate the efficiency impact of the behavior we identify and find that it has a negative impact on the true goal of the organization.

Concert tickets can be sold at the same price or at different prices that reflect different seating categories. Price discrimination generates about 5% greater revenues than single-price ticketing. The return to price discrimination is higher in markets with greater demand heterogeneity, as predicted by price discrimination theory. The return to an increase from three to four concert seat categories is roughly half that of an increase from one to two.