• DOI:10.1007/978-3-031-16617-4_8
• Corpus ID: 232035423

Interactions Between Social Norms and Incentive Mechanisms in Organizations

@inproceedings{Khodzhimatov2021InteractionsBS,
  title={Interactions Between Social Norms and Incentive Mechanisms in Organizations},
  author={Ravshanbek Khodzhimatov and Stephan Leitner and Friederike Wall},
  booktitle={COINE},
  year={2021}
}

• Ravshanbek Khodzhimatov, S. Leitner, F. Wall
• Published in COINE 24 February 2021
• Economics

We focus on how individual behavior that complies with social norms interferes with performance-based incentive mechanisms in organizations with multiple distributed decision-making agents. We model social norms to emerge from interactions between agents: agents observe other the agents’ actions and, from these observations, induce what kind of behavior is socially acceptable. By complying with the induced socially accepted behavior, agents experience utility. Also, agents get utility from a pay-for-performance incentive mechanism. Thus, agents pursue two objectives. We place the interaction between social norms and performance-based incentive mechanisms in the complex environment of an organization with distributed decision-makers, in which a set of interdependent tasks is allocated to multiple agents. The results suggest that, unless the sets of assigned tasks are highly correlated, complying with emergent socially accepted behavior is detrimental to the organization’s performance. However, we find that incentive schemes can help offset the performance loss by applying individual-based incentives in environments with lower task-complexity and team-based incentives in environments with higher task-complexity.