Firms designing incentive programs face important questions about their effectiveness - When do financial rewards work, when does social information work, and does combining them do more than either alone to influence consumer behavior? We address these using a randomized field experiment at a U.S. university recreation center, assigning participants of a group exercise program to one of four conditions - financial incentives (FI), rank information (RI), both (combined), or neither (control). Our results show that neither FI, RI, nor their combination significantly increases workout frequency or variety over the four-week intervention. However, FI and the combined treatment each improve goal completion (i.e., meeting weekly workout targets), relative to control, reflecting a shift in the temporal distribution of effort rather than an increase in total activity. Only the combined treatment shows persistence of effects on goal completion in the two weeks after the incentive period ends. Our mechanism analyses show stronger effects among participants who engage early on with the incentive program and explain the added value of rank information when paired with financial incentives for high-ranking participants and for openers of rank emails. The treatment effects are heterogeneous; the combined treatment works best for participants with salient intrinsic goals such as weight loss, whereas FI alone is effective for those without such goals. Both work better for consumers with past experience in the workout program. Our findings suggest that the effectiveness of incentive programs depends on consumer motivation and program engagement with implications for how firms should target and structure wellness offerings.

While it is well established that a prison incarceration often causes a life-long stigma, there is only a limited understanding of how the prison inmates anticipate such mistreatment. In Study 1, we investigate the beliefs of Czech inmates (N=297) about trust and altruism by the general public to them while varying if their prison identity is revealed, using an incentivized lab-in-the-field experiment. We find strong evidence of optimism bias in anticipated altruism. Furthermore, we examine the causal impact of a self-affirmation intervention but find no significant effects on any of the outcomes. In Study 2 (N=489), we conceptually replicate the optimism bias in altruism and identify the likely underlying mechanism to be the perception that the public sympathizes with their experiences of prison hardships and the ambiguity about the crime they committed. The overoptimism dissipates in a more dynamic setting when directly questioned. Our findings underscore the importance of addressing optimism bias in stigma expectations to improve the effectiveness of reintegration programs for inmates.

This study examines gender bias in performance evaluations made by male leaders during an incentivized, team-based simulated task. Using a correspondence-style experimental design with three treatment arms that vary in performance ambiguity and the cost of biased decision-making, I find that under ambiguous conditions (\textit{No Information} treatment), male leaders are 33–40.5% more likely to replace perceived female team members. Increasing performance transparency Information treatment) mitigates statistical discrimination based on group attributes; however, replaced female team members still face 16.8-21% stricter performance thresholds, reinforcing glass ceiling effects. A novel incentive-based intervention (Reward treatment) provides suggestive evidence that increasing the cost of biased decisions can reduce taste-based discrimination. These findings highlight the theoretical interplay between statistical and taste-based bias in organizational performance evaluations and offers an innovative and practical incentive-driven approach to promoting fairness without imposing explicit diversity mandates.