Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Working Knowledge
Business Research for Business Leaders
  • Browse All Articles
  • Popular Articles
  • Cold Call Podcast
  • Managing the Future of Work Podcast
  • About Us
  • Book
  • Leadership
  • Marketing
  • Finance
  • Management
  • Entrepreneurship
  • All Topics...
  • Topics
    • COVID-19
    • Entrepreneurship
    • Finance
    • Gender
    • Globalization
    • Leadership
    • Management
    • Negotiation
    • Social Enterprise
    • Strategy
  • Sections
    • Book
    • Podcasts
    • HBS Case
    • In Practice
    • Lessons from the Classroom
    • Op-Ed
    • Research & Ideas
    • Research Event
    • Sharpening Your Skills
    • What Do You Think?
    • Working Paper Summaries
  • Browse All
    When Good Incentives Lead to Bad Decisions
    13 Aug 2012Research & Ideas

    When Good Incentives Lead to Bad Decisions

    by Carmen Nobel
    New research by Associate Professor Shawn A. Cole, Martin Kanz, and Leora Klapper explores how various compensation incentives affect lending decisions among bank loan officers. They find that incentives have the power to change not only how we make decisions, but how we perceive reality.
    LinkedIn
    Email

    Among the culprits contributing to the recent financial crisis were bank loan officers who approved mortgage loans that were doomed to fail. Many of these frontline workers were motivated by bonuses and other incentives to approve quantity over quality. Critics decried their voracity. But new research suggests there was something at work beyond simple greed, setting the stage for deeper exploration of how incentives shape not only what we do, but also how we perceive reality.

    “The question of incentives is fundamental to economics.”

    "The question of incentives is fundamental to economics," says Shawn A. Cole, an associate professor in the Finance Unit at Harvard Business School. "A frequent criticism of bankers in the recent crisis is that they took a lot of incentive pay in the years leading up to the crisis. And when their firms lost a lot of money, bonuses could not readily be reclaimed by investors in the firm who lost money."

    In a new research paper, coauthored with World Bank economists Martin Kanz and Leora Klapper, Cole explores how various performance incentives affect lending decisions among bank loan officers. Not surprisingly, the authors found that loan officers were more judicious about issuing loans when their bonus incentives were tied to whether the loans performed well.

    More surprisingly, they found that incentives actually have the power to distort loan officers' perceptions of how a loan will perform.

    An Experimental Field Study

    In an experimental field study, the researchers set out to test the efficacy of three distinct incentive schemes for employees in charge of assessing risk and issuing loans: the origination bonus (in which officers are rewarded a commission for every loan issued); the low-powered incentive (in which officers receive small rewards for loans that perform well and small penalties for loans that perform badly); and the high-powered incentive (in which officers receive big rewards for issuing loans that perform well, but big penalties for loans that default).

    To begin, the researchers collected a random sample of actual applications from entrepreneurs seeking commercial loans for the first time. They acquired the loan files from a large commercial lender in India, a country challenged by a dearth of verifiable financial data. As is common in emerging markets, many residents have no personal identification documentation, let alone a credit score. Loan officers often end up relying on qualitative information and intuition, all the while knowing that these loans may be vital to the nation's economy.

    "Small businesses in emerging markets are thought to be among the large engines of employment and economic growth," Cole explains. "But they often find it hard to get access to financing because they lack the large amounts of collateral that banks typically require. So we were interested in studying this small business segment, which is difficult to lend to but could potentially have a large impact."

    The researchers then recruited 209 experienced loan officers from several leading private—and public-sector Indian commercial banks to participate in up to 15 loan assessment sessions. Participants were asked to evaluate six applications per session, rating applications on personal, business, management, and financial risk before granting or denying the loan.

    Load AppovedBecause these applications had already been processed in real life, the researchers knew whether each one had been accepted for a loan, and which of the accepted loans had eventually defaulted. But for the purposes of the experiment, participants had no information other than the data in the original applications. In this way, the researchers could determine whether they made good decisions without the benefit of hindsight.

    In addition to the quality of the decision, the researchers measured the participants' screening effort, their personal assessment of an application's riskiness, and whether the participants decided to issue the loan.

    At the start of each session, before evaluating the applications, participants were assigned to one of the aforementioned incentive schemes, such that some incentives came with bigger rewards or penalties than others.

    The researchers found that incentive schemes based solely on origination resulted in a 16 percent increase in lending compared with a high-powered incentive scheme, and reduced profitability by 5 percent. Meanwhile, the promise of high-powered incentives increased the detection of bad applications by 11 percent, thus boosting the profits per originated loans by 3 percent.

    "We found that when the stakes were higher, [participants] exerted more effort and made better decisions than when the stakes were lower or when they were simply incentivized to originate loans," Cole explains. "It wasn't just that they were more conservative, but that they were doing a better job of ferreting out bad loans."

    Altered Perception

    Before deciding whether to approve an application for a loan, participants were told to rate the application on a scale of 0 to 100. Loan approvals were not contingent on a minimum score. "This approach is common practice for consumer and small-enterprise loans for which the bank records internal ratings but does not use predictive credit scoring in the approval process," the authors explain in their paper, Incentivizing Calculated Risk-Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers.

    Cole says he was especially surprised to find that the nature of the incentive actually changed participants' perceptions of whether an application was a risky proposition or a safe bet. When evaluating identical applications, participants receiving an origination bonus issued higher ratings than those receiving incentives that were tied to a loan's success. It wasn't simply that receiving an origination bonus increased the likelihood that an officer would approve an application for a loan; it was that the bonus made him or her truly believe that the application was more worthy.

    "When you look at the portfolio of loans made by loan officers who were paid an origination bonus, it actually looks less risky than a portfolio of the exact same set of loans made by officers who were penalized when the loans defaulted, because their ratings were distorted," Cole explains.

    To Cole, that finding is significant because it suggests that irresponsible lending practices are based not just on greed, but also on inadvertent delusion.

    “When the stakes were higher, [participants] exerted more effort and made better decisions than when the stakes were lower or when they were simply incentivized to originate loans.”

    "It's informative for thinking about the financial crisis and how we got there," he says. "A cynical view is that mortgage originators in the United States made a lot of loans that they knew for sure were going to fail, but they issued them anyway because they just wanted to collect their bonuses. And certainly that happened sometimes. But based on our research, it also could be that people's true judgment was distorted because of their incentives."

    The research has implications not only for banks, but also for any firm that offers incentives to its employees.

    "When thinking about compensation policies, it's important to realize the various effects they could have," Cole says. "It's possible that setting up an incentive scheme somehow conveys information to your employees not just about what types of things you want them to do, but also about what you want them to believe."

    Deferred Compensation Dilemma

    While those findings suggest that high-powered incentives are more effective than origination bonuses, there are drawbacks inherent in the delayed nature of performance-based bonuses, the researchers discovered. The paper notes that any incentive tied to a loan's performance must be paid at least several months after the loan is issued, simply because it takes a while to determine whether the borrower is going to pay the loan back.

    For the sake of the experiment, the researchers promised immediate compensation to some participants and deferred compensation to others, regardless of the incentive scheme. Unfortunately, the researchers found that a deferral in compensation led to lazier application screening by the participating loan officers. In other words, delayed compensation attenuated the positive effects of the high-powered incentives.

    "While our inclination might be to make incentive payments conditional on performance, that may come at a cost because deferred compensation is less able to motivate loan officers than immediate compensation," Cole says. "A lot of literature shows that people in a wide variety of settings overvalue today's money versus money in 90 days. People are impatient and, many would argue, irrationally so."

    In a follow-up line of research, Cole is studying the link between a firm's compensation programs and the personalities of its employees.

    "We're conducting a project to see how the incentive schemes you choose affect the type of workers you get," he explains. "If you have an incentive scheme that rewards performance a lot you may get individuals who like risk, whereas if you have a more conservative incentive scheme you may get individuals who are more conservative. And depending on the goals of your organization, you may want to attract different types of people."

    Comments
      • Jill Machol
      • Compensation Manager, Providence Hospital
      Human Resources and compensation professionals have known for years that incentives need to be very carefully crafted because people will always do exactly what you "incent" them to do. I have been in compensation and HR for 25 years and I have never encountered an incentive or bonus plan that did not result in unintended consequences of one sort or another.
      • Neil Reay
      • Managing Director, CNCA Health
      I see another option for incentives to distort perception and action. Obviously, no company rationally intends to promote actions that are inappropriate or illegal. But if the employee sees an incentive program that appears to promote certain types of behavior, such as more mortgages even if the applicant pool is high risk, then the employee can say that the company knows best, and the incentive justifies and "authorizes" the appropriateness of the action. If the employee is "just doing what they pay me to do," it absolves them of responsibility for the action and allows them to re-frame the perception from risk to good business.
      • Anonymous
      Very interesting. I wonder why they did not test for no incentives at all, except of course that the regular fixed salary. Maybe they assumed low-powered incentives were similar to no incentives, but that is not necessarily the case, as from some behavioral economics experiments, adding small incentives changes behavior and stress levels.
      It would be great if professor Cole comments on this!
      • Anonymous
      i think people do what belief to get profit for their life and incentives have significant impact on the decision for the person and when i compare couple bank which provide loan to the community i will chose the one allow me more incentives and prove me high rate of return
      • Gary Zeune CPA
      • Managing Director, The Pros & The Cons
      I teach 100+ fraud/auditing/ethics classes every year. The Risk Assessment Auditing Standards require CPAs to 'understand the entity and the environment". Part of the environment is what would drive someone to cook the books. How much they'll be paid and think they won't get caught. Compensation drives behavior. That's why sales people are paid a commission. What would happen if you paid sales people hourly? Totally different behavior. Paying a commission on sales is dysfunctional because the sales person gets paid for the sale. That results in bad debts. You pay vendors with profits. You can only pay vendors with cash. So how do you change sales behavior. Pay on collection. Now sales people won't try and sneak a shaky credit sale by the accounting dept because sales won't get paid.

      Another example was Domino's "30 Minutes or It's Free". The 30 minutes started when the customer called (because that's the only time the customer can measure). The result was that the driver had no control over how long he/she had to deliver the pizza. Management failed to anticipate that drivers would break the law to meet the guarantee. Until a driver blew through a 4 way stop and ran over a woman and killed her. Domino's dropped the system the following week.

      LESSON: Any time you change a system people will ALWAYS change their behavior. You must anticipate how employee will change their behavior.

      I've written 25 articles on fraud and behavior ou can find at www.TheProsAndTheCons.com (my speakers bureau for white collar criminals). Read "Does Your Compensation System Encourage Illegal Behavior" and "Are You Teaching Your Employees to Steal?"

      There are also 200 videos on our web site on fraud and strategy. 30 seconds to 45 minutes. All FREE.
      • Jim Winkelmann
      • President, Blue Ocean Portfolios, LLC
      We found that in designing both sales and administrative incentives it is important to recognize the unique emotional characteristics that are important to each positions and the incentive designed for that position. We have our best people in those roles take a personality evaluation and to develop a personality benchmark for the specific job description. We have found that this reduces the guess work in our hiring decisions and have experienced a very good moral with everyone incentive in a way that creates contentment for the employee and revenue/profit growth for the company. Also we have found that it is better to have the incentives always with a new business bias, even for the administrators. This way everyone is in sales and new business. Of course this only took me about 30 years to figure out!
      • Kapil Kumar Sopory
      • Company Secretary, SMEC(India) Private Limited
      An employee has to do his job(s) as per the laid down Company expectations and the blue print provided to him. Business development in banks, be it processing and granting of loans, recovery of non-performing assets or mopping up of deposits, are related to the role and nothing out of the way for which special monetary or non-monetary incentives need to be provided. Such provisions are greed-linked right from day one. As an ex-banker, it is my experience that some bank men go out of the way to achieve much beyond their budgeted targets and their bosses routinely appreciate them without examining the quality of the output. These so called high performers are patted and promoted; those more keen for quality are generally ignored. In course of time, the former lot's performance gets visibly reflected adversely due to non-recovery of loans, etc. By then many of these staffers might have left leaving the company in dire straits. Sub-p
      rime lending is an example of this.
      The moment laid down norms are diluted and flouted , all must get alert and not permit such actions.
      Let's provide a proper compensation package without any incentives; if need be and there being tested cogent reasons, the Board may consider to award merit appropriately and that too in very exceptional cases only.
      • Jay Somasundaram
      • Systems Analyst
      The findings are not at all surprising: This is exactly what Mark Twain popularised as corn pone opinions. What would have been interesting would have been interesting would be to compare with decision-making without incentives. Reserach popularised by Dan Pink suggests that incentives actually reduce performance for complex decisions.
      • Kumudkantish
      • AstraZeneca
      Hi, I have been working in a pharmaceutical company and this sector is known for its deeply rooted incentive schemes . Few observations are. To get immediat market share a robust incentive scheme has been acting as priority . However to become profitable a product has to be in a continuous growth phase not only in first few months . This robust incentive makes the frontline act more aggressively looking at short term goal rather being a part of rational long term growth. Can we make this a reality ? A sale may not be a true sale till it is purched by end users. Shelf shifting creates higher inventory . Customer loyalty , Long term performance related benefit linked with career growth can symbiotic . A strong organizational culture based on ethical practices, incentivizing long term association, care and security can act as a motivation the same level as the financial incentives do. I have seen the front line not having a clear pi
      cture what their long term association , care and security can offer apart from short term not so huge financial incentives. A culture motives more than any thing else.
      • Vimi Jain
      "Irresponsible lending practices are based not just on greed, but also on inadvertent delusion." I agree to this statement, and in my opinion the progression towards lowering the bar for what constitutes a risky loan it is gradual. As the bar is lowered (motivated by greed), the loan officer in his mind, fixes that as the threshold and approves all future loans with the revised parameters in mind. After a while, the bar goes down further.
      Trending
        • 08 Sep 2022
        • Book

        Gen Xers and Millennials, It’s Time To Lead. Are You Ready?

        • 25 Jan 2022
        • Research & Ideas

        More Proof That Money Can Buy Happiness (or a Life with Less Stress)

        • 25 Feb 2019
        • Research & Ideas

        How Gender Stereotypes Kill a Woman’s Self-Confidence

        • 17 May 2017
        • Research & Ideas

        Minorities Who 'Whiten' Job Resumes Get More Interviews

        • 28 Mar 2023
        • Research & Ideas

        The FDA’s Speedy Drug Approvals Are Safe: A Win-Win for Patients and Pharma Innovation

    Shawn A. Cole
    Shawn A. Cole
    John G. McLean Professor of Business Administration
    Contact
    Send an email
    → More Articles
    Find Related Articles
    • Commercial Banking
    • Motivation and Incentives
    • Compensation and Benefits
    • Risk Management
    • Financing and Loans
    • Banking

    Sign up for our weekly newsletter

    Interested in improving your business? Learn about fresh research and ideas from Harvard Business School faculty.
    This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
    ǁ
    Campus Map
    Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
    Baker Library | Bloomberg Center
    Soldiers Field
    Boston, MA 02163
    Email: Editor-in-Chief
    →Map & Directions
    →More Contact Information
    • Make a Gift
    • Site Map
    • Jobs
    • Harvard University
    • Trademarks
    • Policies
    • Accessibility
    • Digital Accessibility
    Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College