Psychological Foundations of Incentives

Authors

Ernst Fehr, Visiting Fellow University of Zurich
Armin Falk, University of Zurich

Abstract

During the last two decades economists have made much progress in understanding incentives, contracts and organizations. Yet, they constrained their attention to a very narrow and empirically questionable view of human motivation. The purpose of this paper is to show that this narrow view of human motivation may severely limit understanding the determinants and e0ects of incentives. Economists may fail to understand the levels and the changes in behaviour if they neglect motives like the desire to reciprocate or the desire to avoid social disapproval. We show that monetary incentives may back2re and reduce the performance of agents or their compliance with rules. In addition, these motives may generate very powerful incentives themselves. .c 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.