In our recent paper, we focus on how individual behavior that complies with social norms interferes with performance-based incentive mechanisms in organizations with multiple distributed decision-making agents. The results suggest that, unless the sets of assigned tasks are highly correlated, complying with emergent socially accepted behavior is detrimental to the organization’s performance. However, we find that incentive schemes can help offset the performance loss by applying individual-based incentives in environments with lower task-complexity and team-based incentives in environments with higher task-complexity.
The paper is available here: Link to paper