IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2609.32859.html

When Less Is More: Managing AI Adoption with Adaptive Incentive Design

Author

Listed:
  • Jie Gong
  • Jiayi Hou
  • Jin Li
  • Fei Pu
  • Xinjue Yao

Abstract

We study gaming and adaptive incentive design in AI adoption. A large medical-device company required roughly 5,000 employees to submit at least 200 queries per month to an internal AI assistant. First-time use increased significantly after the mandate, but usage patterns suggested gaming: query counts bunched at the threshold, and 31 percent of queries were repeated or off-task. The firm subsequently revised incentive design and lowered the target to 100. Using staggered implementation across branches, we estimate that the adjustment reduced query volume by 30 percent, with repeated or off-task queries accounting for about 90 percent of the decline. The estimated change in non-repeated, work-related queries was small and statistically insignificant. Among sales employees, monthly sales increased by 7 percent. The findings identify incentive adaptation as a consequential margin of technology adoption: recalibrating usage requirements can reduce gaming and improve employee performance.

Suggested Citation

  • Jie Gong & Jiayi Hou & Jin Li & Fei Pu & Xinjue Yao, 2026. "When Less Is More: Managing AI Adoption with Adaptive Incentive Design," Papers 2609.32859, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2609.32859
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.32859
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Nicholas Bloom & Raffaella Sadun & John Van Reenen, 2012. "Americans Do IT Better: US Multinationals and the Productivity Miracle," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(1), pages 167-201, February.
    2. Paul Oyer, 1998. "Fiscal Year Ends and Nonlinear Incentive Contracts: The Effect on Business Seasonality," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 113(1), pages 149-185.
    3. Timothy Bresnahan & Pai-Ling Yin, 2017. "Adoption of New Information and Communications Technologies in the Workplace Today," Innovation Policy and the Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 17(1), pages 95-124.
    4. Eleanor W. Dillon & Sonia Jaffe & Nicole Immorlica & Christopher T. Stanton, 2025. "Shifting Work Patterns with Generative AI," NBER Working Papers 33795, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Baker, George P, 1992. "Incentive Contracts and Performance Measurement," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 100(3), pages 598-614, June.
    6. Holmstrom, Bengt & Milgrom, Paul, 1991. "Multitask Principal-Agent Analyses: Incentive Contracts, Asset Ownership, and Job Design," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 7(0), pages 24-52, Special I.
    7. Scott Counts & Yan Chen & Jing Dong & Himanshu Sharma & Andrey Zaikin & Rui Hu & Alperen Kok & Gorkem Ozer Yilmaz & Siddharth Suri & Kiran Tomlinson & Sonia Jaffe & Will Wang, 2026. "AI in the Enterprise: How People Use M365 Copilot Chat," Papers 2605.23958, arXiv.org.
    8. Forman, Chris & Goldfarb, Avi & Greenstein, Shane, 2005. "How did location affect adoption of the commercial Internet? Global village vs. urban leadership," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 58(3), pages 389-420, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Oyer, Paul & Schaefer, Scott, 2011. "Personnel Economics: Hiring and Incentives," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 20, pages 1769-1823, Elsevier.
    2. Delfgaauw, Josse & Souverijn, Michiel, 2016. "Biased supervision," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 107-125.
    3. Christophe Lemiére & Gaute Torsvik & Ottar Mæstad & Christopher H. Herbst & Kenneth L. Leonard, 2013. "Evaluating the Impact of Results-Based Financing on Health Worker Performance: Theory, Tools and Variables to Inform an Impact Evaluation," Health, Nutrition and Population (HNP) Discussion Paper Series 98269, The World Bank.
    4. repec:eee:labchp:v:3:y:1999:i:pb:p:2373-2437 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Courty, Pascal & Marschke, Gerald, 2004. "A General Test of Gaming," CEPR Discussion Papers 4514, Centre for Economic Policy Research.
    6. Bloom, Nicholas & Van Reenen, John, 2011. "Human Resource Management and Productivity," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 19, pages 1697-1767, Elsevier.
    7. Tomasz Obloj & Peter Zemsky, 2015. "Value creation and value capture under moral hazard: Exploring the micro-foundations of buyer– supplier relationships," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(8), pages 1146-1163, August.
    8. Sinan Aral & Erik Brynjolfsson & Lynn Wu, 2012. "Three-Way Complementarities: Performance Pay, Human Resource Analytics, and Information Technology," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 58(5), pages 913-931, May.
    9. Sandra Cavaco & Patricia Crifo & Aymeric Guidoux, 2020. "Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance: The Role of Executive Compensation," Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 59(2), pages 240-274, April.
    10. Bengt Holmström, 2017. "Pay for Performance and Beyond," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(7), pages 1753-1777, July.
    11. Fuhai Hong & Tanjim Hossain & John A. List & Migiwa Tanaka, 2018. "Testing The Theory Of Multitasking: Evidence From A Natural Field Experiment In Chinese Factories," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 59(2), pages 511-536, May.
    12. Chen, Shuo & Qiao, Xue & Zhu, Zhitao, 2021. "Chasing or cheating? Theory and evidence on China's GDP manipulation," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 189(C), pages 657-671.
    13. Sacha Kapoor, 2020. "Inefficient incentives and nonprice allocations: Experimental evidence from big‐box restaurants," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(2), pages 401-419, April.
    14. Gerald Marschke & Pascal Courty, 2000. "An Empirical Investigation of Gaming Responses to Performance Incentives," Discussion Papers 00-12, University at Albany, SUNY, Department of Economics.
    15. Kevin J. Stiroh, 2007. "Playing For Keeps: Pay And Performance In The Nba," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 45(1), pages 145-161, January.
    16. repec:eee:labchp:v:3:y:1999:i:pb:p:2485-2563 is not listed on IDEAS
    17. Douglas H. Frank & Tomasz Obloj, 2014. "Firm‐specific human capital, organizational incentives, and agency costs: Evidence from retail banking," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(9), pages 1279-1301, September.
    18. Pascal Courty & Gerald Marschke, 2004. "An Empirical Investigation of Gaming Responses to Explicit Performance Incentives," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 22(1), pages 23-56, January.
    19. Yiming Cao & Raymond Fisman & Hui Lin & Yongxiang Wang, 2018. "Target setting and Allocative Inefficiency in Lending: Evidence from Two Chinese Banks," NBER Working Papers 24961, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Susan Feng Lu, 2012. "Multitasking, Information Disclosure, and Product Quality: Evidence from Nursing Homes," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 21(3), pages 673-705, September.
    21. McCausland, David & Pouliakas, Konstantinos & Theodossiou, Ioannis, 2005. "Some are Punished and Some are Rewarded: A Study of the Impact of Performance Pay on Job Satisfaction," MPRA Paper 14243, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    22. Ro’i Zultan & Eldar Dadon, 2023. "Missing the forest for the trees: when monitoring quantitative measures distorts task prioritization," Working Papers 2319, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2609.32859. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.