This study investigates the performance effects of the combined use of three reinforcers, or incentive motivators, commonly used by companies: monetary incentives, feedback, and recognition. Using a field experiment in a retail services company, I test whether these incentives, which appeal to diverse motivation mechanisms—tangible payoffs, self-regulation, and social esteem—and, hence, have different utilities, are complements or substitutes. The results of the hard performance data collected, in the form of a ratio of sales relative to goals, show that monetary incentives and recognition are substitutes, while feedback is independent of the other incentives. The negative interaction between monetary incentives and recognition is evidence of crowding out between tangible payoffs and social esteem motivations. Individually, these two incentives have a positive impact on performance of about 13 percentage points, which corresponds to a 32.5 percent performance increase. Feedback interactions and main effects are not statistically significant, which suggests that, in this setting, providing feedback in the form of knowledge of results has no impact.

This paper presents the results from a field experiment that examines the effects of nonfinancial performance feedback on the behavior of professionals working for an insurance repair company. We vary the frequency (weekly and monthly) and the level of detail of the feedback that the 800 professionals receive. Contrary to what we would expect if these professionals conformed to the model of the Bayesian decision maker, more (and more frequent) information does not always help improve performance. In fact, we find that professionals achieve the best outcomes when they receive detailed but infrequent (monthly) feedback. The treatment groups with frequent feedback, regardless of how detailed it is, perform no better than the control group (with monthly and aggregate information). The results are consistent with the information in the latest feedback report being most salient and professionals in the weekly treatments overweighting their most recent performance, hampering their ability to learn.