IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/boe/boeewp/0736.html

How do bonus cap and malus affect risk and effort choice Insight from a lab experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Qun Harris

    (Bank of England)

  • Analise Mercieca

    (Bank of England)

  • Emma Soane

    (Bank of England)

  • Misa Tanaka

    (Bank of England)

Abstract

We conducted a lab experiment to examine how bonus caps and malus affect individuals’ choices of risk and effort. We find that a bonus structure that rewards individuals proportionally to realised investment returns, but does not penalise negative returns, encourages risk-taking; while a bonus cap and malus mitigate risk-taking. However, the difference in risk-taking between the bonus cap and malus treatment groups and the proportional bonus group weakened significantly when the participants’ bonus was conditional on hitting an absolute or relative performance target. We also find some evidence that the bonus cap discourages project search effort relative to the proportional bonus, whereas the difference in the levels of effort between the malus treatment group and the proportional bonus group was not statistically significant.

Suggested Citation

  • Qun Harris & Analise Mercieca & Emma Soane & Misa Tanaka, 2018. "How do bonus cap and malus affect risk and effort choice Insight from a lab experiment," Bank of England working papers 736, Bank of England.
    • Handle: RePEc:boe:boeewp:0736
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/working-paper/2018/how-do-bonus-cap-and-malus-affect-risk-and-effort-choice-insight-from-a-lab-experiment.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Keeley, Michael C, 1990. "Deposit Insurance, Risk, and Market Power in Banking," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(5), pages 1183-1200, December.
    2. Christine R. Harris & Michael Jenkins & Dale Glaser, 2006. "Gender differences in risk assessment: Why do women take fewer risks than men?," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 1, pages 48-63, July.
    3. Shawn Cole & Martin Kanz & Leora Klapper, 2015. "Incentivizing Calculated Risk-Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 70(2), pages 537-575, April.
    4. Thomas Dohmen & Armin Falk, 2011. "Performance Pay and Multidimensional Sorting: Productivity, Preferences, and Gender," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(2), pages 556-590, April.
    5. Thanassoulis, John & Tanaka, Misa, 2018. "Optimal pay regulation for too-big-to-fail banks," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 83-97.
    6. Tyran, Jean-Robert & Andersson, Ola & Holm, Håkan J. & Wengström, Erik, 2013. "Risking Other People?s Money," CEPR Discussion Papers 9743, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    7. Steven D. Levitt & Susanne Neckermann, 2014. "What field experiments have and have not taught us about managing workers," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 30(4), pages 639-657.
    8. Frank Hartmann & Sergeja Slapničar, 2015. "An experimental study of the effects of negative, capped and deferred bonuses on risk taking in a multi-period setting," Journal of Management & Governance, Springer;Accademia Italiana di Economia Aziendale (AIDEA), vol. 19(4), pages 875-896, November.
    9. Marilena Angeli & Shahzad Gitay, 2015. "Bonus regulation: aligning reward with risk in the banking sector," Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, Bank of England, vol. 55(4), pages 322-333.
    10. Eriksson, Tor & Poulsen, Anders & Villeval, Marie Claire, 2009. "Feedback and incentives: Experimental evidence," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 16(6), pages 679-688, December.
    11. Bruggen, Alexander & Strobel, Martin, 2007. "Real effort versus chosen effort in experiments," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 96(2), pages 232-236, August.
    12. Charness, Gary & Gneezy, Uri, 2012. "Strong Evidence for Gender Differences in Risk Taking," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 83(1), pages 50-58.
    13. Rochet, Jean-Charles, 1992. "Capital requirements and the behaviour of commercial banks," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 36(5), pages 1137-1170, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bholat, David & Broughton, Nida & Ter Meer, Janna & Walczak, Eryk, 2019. "Enhancing central bank communications using simple and relatable information," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(C), pages 1-15.

    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. Qun Harris & Misa Tanaka & Emma Soane, 2020. "Does bonus cap curb risk taking? An experimental study of relative performance pay and bonus regulation," Bank of England working papers 882, Bank of England.
    2. Charness, Gary & Kuhn, Peter, 2011. "Lab Labor: What Can Labor Economists Learn from the Lab?," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 3, pages 229-330, Elsevier.
    3. Sheedy, Elizabeth & Zhang, Le & Liao, Yin, 2023. "Deferred pay: Compliance and productivity with self-selection," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    4. Emanuela Lezzi & Piers Fleming & Daniel John Zizzo, 2015. "Does it matter which effort task you use? A comparison of four effort tasks when agents compete for a prize," Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) 15-05, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
    5. Soane, Emma & Aufegger, Lisa, 2024. "Changing risk-taking: the effects of tasks and incentives on the variability of risk-taking," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 124339, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    6. José-Luis Peydró [AP BACKUP – NOW EXTERNAL] & Mikel Bedayo & Raquel Vegas & Gabriel Jiménez & José-Luis Peydró, 2020. "Screening and Loan Origination Time: Lending Standards, Loan Defaults and Bank Failures," Working Papers 1215, Barcelona School of Economics.
    7. Brice Corgnet & Roberto Hernán Gonzalez & Ricardo Mateo, 2015. "Cognitive Reflection and the Diligent Worker: An Experimental Study of Millennials," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(11), pages 1-13, November.
    8. Corgnet, Brice & Martin, Ludivine & Ndodjang, Peguy & Sutan, Angela, 2019. "On the merit of equal pay: Performance manipulation and incentive setting," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 23-45.
    9. Ernest Dautovic, 2019. "Has Regulatory Capital Made Banks Safer? Skin in the Game vs Moral Hazard," Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie 19.03, Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie.
    10. Emmanuel Dechenaux & Dan Kovenock & Roman Sheremeta, 2015. "A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 18(4), pages 609-669, December.
    11. Lorenzo Ductor & Sanjeev Goyal & Anja Prummer, 2018. "Gender & Collaboration," Working Papers 856, Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance.
    12. Gary Charness & David Masclet & Marie Claire Villeval, 2014. "The Dark Side of Competition for Status," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 60(1), pages 38-55, January.
    13. Beatty, Timothy K.M. & Katare, Bhagyashree, 2018. "Low-cost approaches to increasing gym attendance," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 63-76.
    14. Acharya, Viral & Litov, Lubomir P. & Sepe, Simone M., 2014. "Seeking Alpha, Taking Risk: Evidence from Non-executive Pay in U.S. Bank Holding Companies," Working Papers 13-18, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School, Weiss Center.
    15. Freeman, Richard B. & Pan, Xiaofei & Yang, Xiaolan & Ye, Maoliang, 2025. "Team incentives and lower ability workers: A real-effort experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 233(C).
    16. Renato Filosa, 2007. "Stress testing of the stability of the Italian banking system: a VAR approach," Heterogeneity and monetary policy 0703, Universita di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Dipartimento di Economia Politica.
    17. David Aikman & Andrew Haldane & Marc Hinterschweiger & Sujit Kapadia, 2018. "Rethinking financial stability," Bank of England working papers 712, Bank of England.
    18. Eriksen, Kristoffer W & Kvaløy, Ola, 2015. "2015/01 No guts, no glory: An experiment on excessive risk-taking by Kristoffer W. Eriksen and Ola Kvaløy," UiS Working Papers in Economics and Finance 2015/1, University of Stavanger.
    19. Corgnet, Brice & Gómez-Miñambres, Joaquín & Hernán-González, Roberto, 2018. "Goal setting in the principal–agent model: Weak incentives for strong performance," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 311-326.
    20. Paolo Crosetto & Antonio Filippin & Janna Heider, 2015. "A Study of Outcome Reporting Bias Using Gender Differences in Risk Attitudes," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo Group, vol. 61(1), pages 239-262.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • G28 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • G40 - Financial Economics - - Behavioral Finance - - - General
    • J33 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Compensation Packages; Payment Methods
    • M52 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics - - - Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects

    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:boe:boeewp:0736. 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: Research (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/boegvuk.html .

    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.