A common rationale for the use of salary contracts is that they can produce substantial incentive effects when coupled with firing threats. However, enforcing firing threats may require close supervision of employees, thus possibly offsetting the very reasons salaries are commonly used, such as lowering monitoring costs and granting autonomy to employees. We design a series of experiments to study the effectiveness of firing threats when only limited information is available to supervisors. We show that light and unobtrusive supervision can produce large incentive effects. Compared to salary contracts, firing threats based on observing organizational performance alone increase employees’ output by 70% whereas only observing how long an employee works doubles output. These findings show that salaries can produce large incentive effects even in the absence of intensive supervision. Finally, we show that salary contracts with firing threats perform at least as well as other popular incentive schemes, such as bonuses, individual and team incentives, that rely on a similar amount of information about employees.

使用工资合同的一个常见理由是，当与解雇威胁相结合时，它们可以产生显着的激励效果。然而，实施解雇威胁可能需要对员工进行密切监督，从而可能抵消普遍使用工资的原因，例如降低监控成本和赋予员工自主权。我们设计了一系列实验来研究当主管只能获得有限信息时发射威胁的有效性。我们表明，轻松和不引人注目的监督可以产生巨大的激励效果。与薪水合同相比，仅基于观察组织绩效的解雇威胁会使员工的产出增加 70%，而仅观察员工工作多长时间则产出翻倍。这些发现表明，即使在缺乏严格监督的情况下，工资也能产生很大的激励效应。最后，我们表明，带有解雇威胁的工资合同的表现至少与其他流行的激励计划一样好，例如奖金、个人和团队激励，这些计划依赖于有关员工的类似信息量。