> The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities.
I get the impression that the mechanism for that is that anxiety about getting/losing the incentives can starve the creative processing of mental CPU time and maybe lower your risk tolerance below the optimum. A flat salary shouldn't trigger that regardless of how high it is, and conversely a poor environment (antagonistic management, mandatory overtime if you're not meeting some almost-reasonable deadline, ...) ought to be able to trigger it even if money isn't involved at all.
I get the impression that the mechanism for that is that anxiety about getting/losing the incentives can starve the creative processing of mental CPU time and maybe lower your risk tolerance below the optimum. A flat salary shouldn't trigger that regardless of how high it is, and conversely a poor environment (antagonistic management, mandatory overtime if you're not meeting some almost-reasonable deadline, ...) ought to be able to trigger it even if money isn't involved at all.