Large Bonus Research Articles

Physician Group Practices Accrued Large Bonuses Under Medicare's Bundled Payment Model, 2018-20.

The Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Advanced Model (BPCI-A), a voluntary Alternative Payment Model for Medicare, incentivizes hospitals and physician group practices to reduce spending for patient care episodes below preset target prices. The experience of physician groups in BPCI-A is not well understood. We found that physician groups earned $421million in incentive payments during BPCI-A's first four performance periods (2018-20). Target prices were positively associated with bonuses, with a mean reconciliation payment of $139 per episode in the lowest decile of target prices and $2,775 in the highest decile. In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, mean bonuses increased from $815 per episode to $2,736 per episode. These findings suggest that further policy changes, such as improving target price accuracy and refining participation rules, will be important as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services continues to expand BPCI-A and develop other bundled payment models.

Do competitive bonuses ruin cooperation in heterogeneous teams?

AbstractA debate among practicing managers is whether to use cooperative or competitive incentives for team production. While competitive incentives may drive individual effort higher, they may also lead to less help and more sabotage, with unclear consequences overall, especially when team members' abilities differ. Using a lab experiment, we examine how increasing competitive incentives affects performance as team composition changes. We find that competitive incentives generally under‐perform noncompetitive incentives and a larger bonus does not generate enough effort to compensate for a loss in help. Our results help understand better how to balance out individual versus team rewards and how firms could structure teams when employees have heterogeneous abilities.

Upaya Pencegahan White Collar Crime

White collar crime is increasingly prevalent in various corporate sectors and causes significant financial losses and damage to public trust. This type of crime includes embezzlement of funds, manipulation of financial statements, bribery, insider trading in the capital market, and theft of customer personal data. Although it occurs a lot, the prevention of white collar crime is still not optimal and the perpetrators are rarely prosecuted properly. This paper aims to analyze the various determinants that influence the occurrence of white collar crime in order to formulate policy recommendations and prevention strategies in the future. A systematic approach is used by applying the fraud triangle theory which focuses on the three main elements that cause fraud, namely pressure, opportunity and rationalization. The results of the study show that pressure to meet high performance targets and large bonuses often encourage individuals to commit fraud. Meanwhile, weak supervision and lack of transparency create opportunities for fraud. Perpetrators also often justify their actions, for example by assuming that they will not be caught or the value of the loss is small. The complexity of modern corporate operations also increases opportunities for white-collar crime. Effective prevention efforts must be comprehensive by involving various parties and strengthening a number of aspects as controls. The role of internal and external supervisors (auditors) of companies needs to be continuously improved, supported by modem fraud detection technology tools. Whistleblowing mechanisms need to be strengthened in every company and kept confidential to encourage early reporting of fraud indications.

CEO Greed, Corporate Governance, and CSR Performance: Asian Evidence

In this study, we examined the association between CEO greed and corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance with a particular emphasis on the curtailing role of corporate governance. We found that CEO greed has a negative effect on CSR, since an uncontrolled pursuit of personal gain typically reveals myopic behavior and the foregoing of investment in CSR by a greedy CEO. Additionally, we found that CEO compensation in the form of large bonuses, support, and restricted stocks options weakened the link between CEO greed and CSR. Concerning the power dynamics amongst CEOs (CEO duality and tenure), we found that CEO duality moderates the negative relation between CEO greed and CSR. We also explored the curtailing role of corporate governance (proxies represented by board gender diversity and board independence) in the association between CEO greed and CSR. Our findings show that gender diversity curtails the negative effect of CEO greed on CSR once it reaches critical mass on the corporate board. Gender critical mass also curtails the negative impact of CEO greed on CSR, even if the CEO exercises duality. Our findings have empirical and practical implications. This study contributes to the existing literature by exploring the relationship between CEO greed and CSR in Asia, a region not renowned for CSR performance. This study also provides evidence for the curtailing role of compensation and governance factors in the negative relationship between CEO greed and CSR.

Is recursive "mindreading" really an exception to limitations on recursive thinking?

The ability to mindread recursively-for example, by thinking what person 1 thinks person 2 thinks person 3 thinks-is a prime example of recursive thinking in which one process, representation, or idea becomes embedded within a similar one. It has also been suggested that mindreading is an exceptional example, with five recursive steps commonly observed for mindreading, in comparison with just one or two in other domains. However, conceptual analysis of existing recursive mindreading tasks suggests that conclusions about exceptional mindreading are insecure. Revised tasks were devised to provide a more rigorous test of recursive mindreading capacity. Study 1 (N = 76) found significantly worse performance at level-5 recursive mindreading on the revised tasks (17% correct) compared with the original tasks (80% correct), and no effect of moderate financial bonuses for good performance. Study 2 (N = 74) replicated poor performance at level-5 recursive mindreading on the revised tasks (15% correct) in the absence of bonuses, but found better performance (45% correct) when participants were offered large bonuses for accuracy, encouraged to take as much time as needed, and assisted with a strategy for recursive reasoning. These findings suggest that, like recursive thinking in other domains, recursive mindreading is effortful and limited. We discuss how the proposed role for high levels of recursive mindreading in communication, culture, and literature might be reconciled with these limitations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Ambiguous Sticks and Carrots: The Effect of Contract Framing and Payoff Ambiguity on Employee Effort

ABSTRACT Research suggests that employees work harder under penalty contracts than under economically equivalent bonus contracts. We build on this literature by examining how the motivational advantage of penalty contracts depends on a common aspect of real-world contracts: payoff ambiguity. With payoff ambiguity, employees provide effort without knowing how much pay they will receive for a given level of performance. According to our theory, this ambiguity opens the door for employee optimism, which has contrasting effects under each contract frame. Results from an experiment support this theory, with an increase in ambiguity leading to less employee effort with penalty contracts (as employees optimistically expect small penalties) and more effort with bonus contracts (as employees optimistically expect large bonuses). We also find that these effects are stronger for more dispositionally optimistic employees. Overall, our results suggest that bonus contracts may be more motivating and penalty contracts less motivating than previously thought.

The Effect of Bonuses on Teacher Retention and Student Learning in Rural Schools: A Story of Spillovers

Abstract We estimate the direct and indirect effects of recruitment bonuses paid to teachers working in rural schools in Peru on their retention and student learning. This is the first study to estimate the indirect effects of a bonus aimed at attracting teachers to disadvantaged schools. This is important for assessing whether the incentive has improved the distribution of teaching resources and for estimating the direct effect without bias. We exploit the exogenous variation produced in the size of the bonus by the rule used to classify rural schools, and allow ineligible schools to be affected if they have an eligible school nearby. We find the bonus produces positive direct effects on teacher retention but also a negative spillover on the probability of filling teacher vacancies in neighboring schools. This spillover indicates that the bonus is redistributing resources between equally disadvantaged schools. We also find that the bonus has no direct effects on student learning and produces a positive spillover on the scores of students in neighboring schools. We argue these results are due to the poor pedagogical skills of the teachers being mobilized by the scheme. A reasonable policy alternative is a scheme that targets talented teachers with larger bonuses.

Bonus Season: A Theory of Periodic Labor Markets and Coordinated Bonuses

We present a general equilibrium model in which firms and workers coordinate compensation so that turnover is high in some periods and low in others. This ensures that firms and workers typically search for new matches when other firms and workers are available. If firms and workers find themselves in a periodic equilibrium, contracts often feature large bonuses paid just prior to periods of high labor market turnover. The theory’s predictions match stylized facts concerning compensation and turnover in high finance and biglaw. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.

The impact of haggling costs on the optimal organizational design for sales forces

We analyze when a firm should delegate pricing authority to a sales agent who is hired to exert non-observable effort in order to search for customers. A successful search yields that the agent becomes better informed than the firm about customers’ willingness to pay, which favors delegation. However, an agent with pricing authority might grant unnecessary price discounts to avoid personal costs from haggling with customers, such as opportunity costs of time or psychological costs, which can undermine the efficacy of delegation. We describe conditions under which the firm favors delegation even in the presence of substantial haggling costs and explain how the delegation decision interacts with performance measure quality. In addition, we show that the interplay between delegation and incentive pay is not univocal. Delegation and incentive pay can be complements if haggling costs are small, but will be substitutes if haggling costs are large. In the former case, the firm wants to avoid unnecessary price discounts by stipulating a large bonus to the agent for selling at a high price. In the latter case, the agent always grants the maximum feasible price discount and benefits from reciprocal customer behavior (e.g., leaving a tip or offering an in-kind gift or favor), which provides the agent with implicit incentives to search for customers.

Ambiguous Sticks and Carrots: The Effect of Contract Framing and Payoff Ambiguity on Employee Effort

Research suggests that employees work harder under penalty contracts than under economically equivalent bonus contracts. We build on this literature by examining how the motivational advantage of penalty contracts depends on a common aspect of real-world contracts: payoff ambiguity. With payoff ambiguity, employees provide effort without knowing how much pay they will receive for a given level of performance. According to our theory, this ambiguity opens the door for employee optimism, which has contrasting effects under each contract frame. Results from an experiment support this theory, with an increase in ambiguity leading to less employee effort with penalty contracts (as employees optimistically expect small penalties) and to more effort with bonus contracts (as employees optimistically expect large bonuses). We also find that these effects are stronger for more dispositionally optimistic employees. Overall, our results suggest that bonus contracts may be more motivating and penalty contracts less motivating than previously thought.

Perfusion Recruitment Strategies Using Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis.

Perfusionists are leaving the workforce in higher rates as baby-boomers retire, yet the volume of cases involving perfusion continues to increase. This change has resulted in a high-demand market with organizations competing for the same candidates. The purpose of this study was to use a choice-based conjoint (CBC) analysis to determine what attributes of employment opportunities are most important to perfusionists so hiring organizations are better equipped to produce employment offers specific to each candidate. The Sawtooth Software Discover program was used to create a CBC survey that was distributed to perfusionists. After a series of demographic questions, respondents chose between three employment offers that comprised eight attributes, each with three varying options. Completed surveys were analyzed using the Discover software, producing importance scores. Two hundred forty surveys were completed, 154 (64%) male and 86 (36%) female. Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) impact to the perfusionist and hours worked per week ranked most important, at 19.4% and 17.5%, respectively. A significant difference exists between ECMO impact to perfusionists and all other attributes. The least important attributes were annual continuing education funds and sign-on bonus/relocation, at 6.8% and 4.7%, respectively. Respondents in their 20s and 30s find the importance of ECMO impact to be significantly less important than those in their 50s. Perfusionists with a master's degree believe salary to be significantly more important than perfusionists with other types of perfusion education. Based on the respondents who completed this survey, the impact ECMO has on the perfusionist was the most significant job attribute. Offering large sign-on bonuses and relocation packages to entice new employees is not indicated as a viable way to satisfy perfusionists. Appropriate management of hours worked, days on call, and how ECMO impacts the perfusionists will be most impactful in recruitment of new employees.

T222. IMPAIRED COST-BENEFIT COMPUTATION IN SOCIAL CONTEXT IN PATIENTS WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA

BackgroundSocial withdrawal is one of core negative symptoms in schizophrenia, which dampens their social outcomes and prognosis. However, the underlying behavioral mechanisms of this symptom are poorly understood. In the present study, we aimed to explore the capacity of cost-benefit computation under social context in schizophrenia patients.MethodsWe recruited twenty-six patients, who met the criteria for diagnosis of schizophrenia, and thirty-one healthy controls matched for their age and gender ratio. All the participants were administrated to Effortful Job Interview Task, which is a novel behavioral paradigm where participants were asked to make an effort to get job offers. Before their taking effort, they were required to decide whether they would like to get involved in a less challenging job interview with no bonus point or a more challenging one with varied bonus points (i.e., 5, 15, 25 points, higher points indicate higher chance of getting a job offer).ResultsIn healthy controls, there was a main effect of prize on the choice percentage of challenging job interview (F (2, 90) = 68.577, p <0.001), with higher percentage of picking challenging interview under large (25) and medium (15) bonus points than low bonus point (5). Schizophrenia patients, however, exhibited lower percentage of challenging interview choices under medium (p =.015) and large (p <.01) bonus points than healthy controls, as reflected by a significant Group x Prize interaction effect (F (2, 110) = 6.478, p <0.01). In addition, we observe significant negative correlations between percentage of challenging interview choices under large bonus and amotivation sub-score on the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (r = -0.49, p = 0.01). Interestingly, patients with schizophrenia displayed spared experience of pleasantness when they received a job offer as compared with healthy controls (p = .09). But, they showed blunted aversive experience towards the outcomes of failure as compared to healthy controls (p < .01).DiscussionThese findings suggest that impaired social cost-benefit computation may play a central role in the symptoms of social withdrawal in schizophrenia, which may facilitate the clinical intervention of negative symptoms.

Work payment as one of the important factors of material incentives

Problem setting. One of the problems in our country is ensuring that every citizen has a decent salary for the amount of work he has done. The target of research is devoted to the study of wages as one of the important factors of material incentives for employees. In the current conditions of building a market economy in Ukraine, one of the first tasks of the state is to develop such a mechanism of incentives for workers, in which all elements of remuneration would play a stimulating role in the performance of the employee’s duties. Analysis of resent researches and publications. The work of such scientists as V.M. Bozhko, V.M. Veger, Yu.M. Veres, O.V. Gayeva, O.S. Galchenko, S.Yu. Golovina, V.V. Zhernakov, I.P. Zhigalkin, G.A. Kaplina, R.Z. Livshits, A.V. Moskalenko, A.Yu. Pashherstnik, S.M. Prilipko, O.I. Protsovsky, N.M. Khutoryan, G.I. Chanisheva, O.M. Yaroshenko, and etc. However, despite the considerable amount of theoretical and empirical work of scholars in the field of remuneration, not all aspects of this problem have been sufficiently developed. In particular, the realities of today require an in-depth study of pay as one of the important factors for material incentives for employees. Article’s main body. Revealing the essence of remuneration as one of the important factors of material incentives for employees, the first focus is on defining and clarifying the relation between the terms “pay” and “wages”. The essence of wages is twofold. On the one hand, it is the main source of income for workers and improving their standard of living, so its size largely characterizes the level of well-being of all members of society, on the other - the main mechanism for material stimulation of growth and productivity, and therefore directly affects the pace and scale of social -economic development of the country. It is stated that in order to increase employee motivation through a material incentive, the following principles should be followed: (a) positive promotion is more effective and constructive than negative, especially in the long run; (b) unpredictable and irregular bonuses are better than expected and projected; (c) large and frequent bonuses are usually jealous, small and frequent bonuses are satisfying. At the same time raising wages it is necessary to think carefully and skillfully about the mechanism of raising the remuneration for the work performed in order to better motivate the employee Conclusions and prospects for the development. It is concluded that in order to increase the material interest of employees in the growth of production and increase the efficiency of work of enterprises, it is necessary to improve the systems of material incentives, remuneration for the results of work, other forms of material incentives. In addition to salaries and bonuses, the system of material incentives may include retirement savings, tuition fees (employee or his children), interest-free loans for the purchase of housing, payment for food or travel of employees, payment for employee rest, various benefits, insurance.

Treatment of Vitamin D Deficiency With Large Bonus Cholecalciferol

Treatment of Vitamin D Deficiency With Large Bonus Cholecalciferol

Managerial bonuses and subordinate mistreatment

Can performance bonuses increase the likelihood that managers coerce their subordinates into exerting high levels of effort when doing so promotes neither efficiency nor equity? We consider a laboratory setting in which managers compete to obtain a large bonus at the end of the experiment and the probability of obtaining it depends partly on the effort exerted by the subordinates. We find that managers are more than twice as likely to punish subordinates exerting “fair” levels of effort if they compete for individual bonuses than when there are no bonuses. This is not the case when they compete for pooled bonuses – giving managers discretionary power over how to share them with their subordinates – as most subordinates willingly exert maximal effort. A model in which individuals are assumed to care about equity captures subordinates’ behavior well. Managers’ willingness to coerce subordinates into exerting unfairly high levels of effort, on the other hand, cannot be readily accounted for by any of the existing models of social preferences.

The relationship between chief executive officer compensation and the size and industry of South African state-owned enterprises

Orientation: Concerns about exorbitant executive compensation are making headlines, because executives receive lucrative packages despite state-owned enterprises (SOEs) performing poorly. It appears as if chief executive officers (CEOs) are not being held accountable for the performance of the SOEs.Research purpose: The purpose of the study was to determine whether the size and the industry of an SOE had an impact on CEO compensation packages.Motivation for the study: A greater understanding of the relationship between CEO remuneration and the size and type of industry of SOEs would assist with the standardisation of CEO remuneration and linking CEO pay to SOE performance.Research approach/design and method: A multiple regression analysis on a pooled dataset of 162 panel observations was conducted over a 9-year period. Financial data of 18 SOEs were extracted from the McGregor BFA database and the annual reports of SOEs.Main findings: The findings show that the size of an SOE does not influence the total compensation of CEOs. However, larger SOEs pay larger bonuses due to these SOEs being in a stronger financial position to offer lucrative bonuses. CEO’s remuneration was aligned within certain industries.Practical/managerial implications: The findings emphasise the need to link CEO compensation with SOE performance. Standardisation in setting CEO compensation and implementing performance contracts should be considered.Contribution/value-add: The study confirms that CEO pay is not linked to performance and not justified when considering SOE size or industry.

Attention-driven demand for bonus contracts

In many markets supply contracts include a series of small, regular payments made by consumers and a single, large bonus that consumers receive at some point during the contractual period. But, if for instance its production costs exceed its value to consumers, such a bonus creates inefficiencies. We offer a novel explanation for the frequent occurrence of bonus contracts, which builds on a model of attentional focusing. Our main result identifies market conditions under which bonus contracts should be observed: while a monopolist pays a bonus to consumers—if at all—only for low-value goods, firms standing in competition always—i.e., independent of the consumers’ valuation—offer bonus contracts. Thus, competition does not eliminate but rather exacerbates inefficiencies arising from contracting with focused agents. Common contract schemes in markets for electricity, telephony, and bank accounts are consistent with our model, but cannot be reconciled with alternative approaches such as models on consumption smoothing, (quasi-)hyperbolic discounting, or switching costs.

Striatal-frontal network activation during voluntary task selection under conditions of monetary reward.

During voluntary task selection, a number of internal and external biases may guide such a choice. However, it is not well understood how reward influences task selection when multiple options are possible. To address this issue, we examined brain activation in a voluntary task-switching paradigm while participants underwent fMRI (n = 19). To reinforce the overall goal to choose the tasks randomly, participants were told of a large bonus that they would receive at the end of the experiment for making random task choices. We also examined how occasional, random rewards influenced both task performance and brain activation. We hypothesized that these transient rewards would increase the value of the just-performed task, and therefore bias participants to choose to repeat the same task on the subsequent trial. Contrary to expectations, transient reward had no consistent behavioral effect on subsequent task choice. Nevertheless, the receipt of such rewards did influence activation in brain regions associated with reward processing as well as those associated with goal-directed control. In addition, reward on a prior trial was found to influence activation during task choice on a subsequent trial, with greater activation in a number of executive function regions compared with no-reward trials. We posit that both the random presentation of transient rewards and the overall task bonus for random task choices together reinforced the goal to choose the tasks randomly, which in turn influenced activation in both reward-related regions and those regions involved in abstract goal processing.

Attention-Driven Demand for Bonus Contracts

In many markets supply contracts include a series of small, regular payments made by consumers and a single, large bonus that consumers receive at some point during the contractual period. But, if for instance its production costs exceed its value to consumers, such a bonus creates inefficiencies. We offer a novel explanation for the frequent occurrence of bonus contracts, which builds on a model of attentional focusing. Our main result identifies market conditions under which bonus contracts should be observed: while a monopolist pays a bonus to consumers - if at all - only for low-value goods, firms standing in competition always - i.e., independent of the consumers’ valuation - offer bonus contracts. Thus, competition does not eliminate but rather exacerbates inefficiencies arising from contracting with focused agents. Common contract schemes in markets for electricity, telephony, and bank accounts are consistent with our model, but cannot be reconciled with alternative approaches such as models on consumption smoothing, (quasi-)hyperbolic discounting, or switching costs.

Clawback Rule – The Ground of Managers Responsible. Model of Remuneration

The paper concerns the duties and responsibilities of managers using the principle of clawback. The authors proposed their own model of financial model of construction of remuneration for managers. There are in practice ethical problems concerning the level of requirements and qualifications versus salary and the level of legal and financial liability, especially against top-managers of the largest enterprises; often in a situation of extensive economic and social impact of their decisions. The problem of a manager’s responsibility has a dual nature. On the one hand the manager is charged with overall responsibility for all financial and PR losses of a company, on the other hand the manager takes moral, legal and financial responsibility for particular decisions. This article considers the financial responsibility area. The subprime financial crisis has sparked a discussion about the responsibility of top management in the context of disclosure of large bonuses paid to the senior managers and lack of consequences for bankruptcies. Very high salaries the executives were paid, were not sufficiently related to the system of contractual and administrative responsibility.