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We conduct an experiment with professional internal auditors and evaluate their performance and objectivity, measured as the extent to which they truthfully report the performance of other participants in a real-effort task. It has been suggested in the literature that incentive-based compensation for auditors has the potential to lead to dishonest behavior, for instance when their payoff depends on the performance of the unit they are auditing. In line with our hypotheses, we find that incentive-based compensation increases dishonest behavior among internal auditors: competitive incentives lead to under-reporting of other participants’ performance, while collective incentives lead to over-reporting of performance. In addition, we find that moving from an environment with objective performance evaluation towards a peer evaluation scheme reduces performance.

Tournaments are widely used in organizations, explicitly or implicitly, to reward the best-performing employees, for example, by promotion or bonuses, and/or to penalize the worst-performing employees, for example, by demotion, withholding bonuses, or unfavorable job assignments. These incentive schemes can be interpreted as various prize allocations based on the employees' relative performance. While the optimal prize allocation in tournaments of symmetric agents is relatively well understood, little is known about the impact of the allocation of prizes on the effectiveness of tournament incentive schemes for heterogeneous agents. We show that while multiple prize allocation rules are equivalent when agents are symmetric in their ability, the equivalence is broken in the presence of heterogeneity. Under a wide range of conditions, loser-prize tournaments, that is, tournaments that award a low prize to relatively few bottom performers, are optimal for the firm. The reason is that low-ability agents are discouraged less in such tournaments, as compared to winner-prize tournaments awarding a high prize to few top performers, and hence can be compensated less to meet their participation constraints. (JEL M52, J33, J24)