An important issue in personnel economics is the design of efficient job allocation rules. Firms often use promotions both to sort workers across jobs and to provide them with incentives. However, the Peter Principle states that employees' output tends to fall after a promotion. Lazear (2004)...

The literature has shown that the overall efficiency of exogenously imposed tournaments is reduced by a high variance in performance. This paper reports results from an experiment analyzing whether allowing subjects to self-select into different payment schemes is reducing the variability of...