We develop metrics to assess the complexity of a bank holding company (BHC), based on its ownership structure. Large BHCs have intricate ownership hierarchies involving hundreds or even thousands of legal entities that may contribute to increased operational risk and greater opacity. Our measures are mathematically grounded, intuitive, and easy to implement. They may be particularly useful in the context of resolution, where regulators often face significant time pressure and coordination challenges. We use regulatory filing data from the Federal Reserve to validate the measures, demonstrating that they provide a useful complement to balance sheet information in assessing BHC complexity. Notably, the proposed measures are highly correlated with existing complexity indicators that are not based on organizational structure and are less correlated with size than these existing complexity measures. We show that the proposed measures provide additional explanatory power for the regulatory indicators, even after controlling for size.

ABSTRACT Many organizations whose core purpose is to advance a social mission pay employees below-market wages. We investigate two under-appreciated benefits of below-market pay in these social-mission organizations. In a series of experiments, we predict and find that, holding employees' outside opportunities constant, those attracted to social-mission organizations that pay below-market wages perform better individually and cooperate more effectively in teams than those attracted to social-mission organizations that pay higher wages. The individual performance effect arises because below-market pay facilitates the selection of value-congruent employees who are naturally inclined to work hard for the organizational mission. The team cooperation effect arises because employees expect team members who have selected a social-mission job that pays below market to be more value-congruent and, therefore, more cooperative than those who have selected a social-mission job that pays higher wages. Collectively, we demonstrate that in social-mission organizations, offering below-market pay can yield selection benefits.

Standardized information disclosures aim to help people compare complex financial products and make better choices. We investigate the extent to which information shown in a regulator-mandated dashboard helps retirement savers choose between alternative pension plans. We conduct incentivized experiments that collect participants’ repeated choices between two pension plans using the mandatory dashboard, and subsequently test whether an even simpler dashboard improves choices, and by how much. Participants switch quickly from a high- to a low-fee pension plan when they see explicit nominal fees but are significantly more confused by percentage fees and adjust slower. When differences between plan performance arise from gross returns, not fees, we find that complex information formats can seriously hinder participants’ recognition and reactions. We present a Bayesian updating model which estimates the relative noisiness of the signals from fees and gross returns across different treatments and use this model to show how better information presentation raises retirement savings.

Women’s reluctance to negotiate is often used to explain the gender wage gap, popularizing the push for women to “lean in” and negotiate more. Examining an environment in which women achieve positive profits when they choose to negotiate, we find that increased negotiations are not helpful. Women know when to ask: they enter negotiations resulting in positive profits and avoid negotiations resulting in negative profits. While the findings are similar for men, we find no evidence that men are more adept than women at knowing when to ask. Thus, our results caution against a greater push for women to negotiate.

ABSTRACT Conventional wisdom suggests that frequent performance reporting is beneficial for decision making, as it can enhance timeliness and usefulness of the reported information for decision making. We investigate a potential motivational cost of frequent performance reporting. Using goal orientation theory, we predict and find that frequent performance reporting has negative motivational and performance implications when employees know or assume that the information they report will be used to evaluate their task-related skill. Our theory and results suggest that organizations need to balance the informational benefits and motivational costs of frequent reporting when designing their performance reporting systems. In addition, our theory and results can help organizations begin to design solutions that take advantage of the informational advantage of frequent reporting while minimizing its motivational costs.

ABSTRACT Performance measure noise can be a critical barrier to employees' learning. Using an experiment, we examine whether the effects of performance measure noise on employees' learning depends on the type of learning in which employees engage: experiential versus vicarious. We predict and find performance measure noise has a more deleterious effect on learning when such learning occurs experientially rather than vicariously. Specifically, we find experiential learners demonstrate less learning as performance measure noise increases, but vicarious learners show no such effect of performance measure noise. Collectively, our findings suggest performance measure noise and learning type play important roles in the extent to which firms realize the decision-facilitating benefits of performance measurement systems. In particular, since much of the learning in modern organizations occurs vicariously, our findings suggest performance measure noise may not be as detrimental to employees' learning as previously thought.