Hidden benefits of reward: A field experiment on motivation and monetary incentives

We conducted a field experiment in a controlled work environment to investigate the effect of motivational talk and its interaction with monetary incentives. We find that motivational talk improves performance only when accompanied by performance pay. Moreover, performance pay reduces performance unless it is accompanied by motivational talk. These effects also carry over to the quality of work. Performance pay alone leads to more mistakes. Adding motivational talk makes the difference. In treatments with performance pay, motivational talk increases output by about 20 percent and reduces the ratio of mistakes by more than 40 percent.     

动量化货币的哲学原理与经济学实验

运动是宇宙物质的普遍存在方式,货币的基本特征是运动。笔者尝试把物理学的动量定理与经济学的交易方程式进行类比,将货币量与货币速度结合起来,建立了动量化货币的指标。对动量化货币、传统货币与货币服务指数(圣路易斯联邦储备银行的指数货币)进行的经验分析表明:动量化货币具有绝对的比较优势;货币的交易速度是重要的宏观经济变量;货币的重要性依赖于它的数量和速度。主流经济学派排斥货币的交易速度,是经济理论的重大失误。     

Reducing ambiguity in lotteries: evidence from a field experiment

Ambiguity about the chances of winning represents a key aspect in lotteries. By means of a controlled field experiment, we exogenously vary the degree of ambiguity about the winning chances of lotteries organized to incentivize the contribution for a public good. In one treatment, people have been simply informed about the maximum number of potential participants (i.e. the number of lottery tickets released). In a second treatment, this information has been omitted as in all traditional lotteries. Our general finding shows that simply reducing the degree of ambiguity of the lottery leads to a sizable and significant increase (67%) in the participation rate. This result is robust to alternative prize configurations.     

Transmission of information within transnational social networks: a field experiment

Several studies have shown a relationship between the stocks of migrants and country-level investment in the home country; however the mechanism through which this relationship operates is still unexplored. We use a field experiment in which participants who are recent immigrants send information about risky decisions to others in their social network in their home country. The results demonstrate how this information influences decisions in the home country. We find that the advice given by family members and decisions made by friends significantly affects an individual’s risky decision-making.     

Effects of supervision on tax compliance: Evidence from a field experiment in Austria

We conduct a field experiment on tax compliance, focusing on newly founded firms. As a novelty the effect of tax authorities’ supervision on timely tax payments is examined. Interestingly, results show no positive overall effect of close supervision on tax compliance.     

A controlled field experiment on corruption

This paper reports on a controlled field experiment on corruption designed to address two important issues: the experimenter's scrutiny and the unobservability of corruption. In the experiment, a grader is offered a bribe along with a demand for a better grade. We find that graders respond more favorably to bigger bribes, while the effect of higher wages is ambiguous: it lowers the bribe's acceptance, but it fosters reciprocation. Monitoring and punishment can deter corruption, but we cannot reject that it may also crowd-out intrinsic motivations for honesty when intensified. Finally, our results suggest several micro-determinants of corruption including age, ability, religiosity, but not gender.     

Externalities in knowledge production: evidence from a randomized field experiment

Experimental Economics - Are there positive or negative externalities in knowledge production? We analyze whether current contributions to knowledge production increase or decrease the future...     

Framing effects on risk-taking behavior: evidence from a field experiment in multiple-choice tests

We exploit testing data to gain better understanding on framing effects on decision-making and performance under risk. In a randomized field experiment, we modified the framing of scoring rules for penalized multiple-choice tests. In penalized multiple-choice tests, right answers are typically framed as gains while wrong answers are framed as losses (Mixed-framing). In the Loss-framing proposed, both non-responses and wrong answers are presented in a loss domain. According to our theoretical model, we expect the change in the framing to decrease students’ non-response and to increase students’ performance. Under the Loss-framing, students’ non-response reduces by a 18%-20%. However, it fails to increase students’ scores. Indeed, our results support the possibility of impaired performance in the Loss-framing.

     

Breaking the elected rules in a field experiment on forestry resources

Harvesting from common resources has been studied through experimental work in the laboratory and in the field. In this paper we report on a dynamic commons experiment, representing a forest, performed with different types of communities of resource users in Thailand and Colombia, as well as student participants. We find that all groups overharvest the resource in the first part of the experiment and that there is no statistical difference between the various types of groups. In the second part of the experiment, participants appropriate the common resource after one of three possible regulations is elected and implemented. There is less overharvesting after the rules are implemented, but there is a significant amount of rule breaking. The surprising finding is that Colombian villagers break the rules of the games more often than other groups, and even more so when they have more trust in members of the community. This observation can be explained by the distrust in externally proposed regulations due to the institutional and cultural context.     

A field experiment on intertemporal enforcement spillovers

Enforcement can affect compliance directly and indirectly, through spillovers. We study intertemporal enforcement spillovers by conducting a randomized field experiment in a university exam. The initial phase of the experiment is the exam itself. We induce variation in enforcement by randomly assigning students to rooms with different monitoring levels. The second phase is post-exam. In this phase, all students are subject to the same low level of monitoring. Our outcome variable is the probability that students steal a pen in the post-exam phase. We find that enforcement in the exam phase has a strong intertemporal spillover on compliance in the post-exam phase: students subject to a high monitoring level in the initial phase are about 33% less likely to steal the pen than students subject to low initial monitoring.     

File sharing as conditional cooperation: evidence from a framed field experiment

In this project, we investigate downloading and sharing behaviour in a novel ‘piracy game’ modelled after standard public good games. We find that willingness to share correlates positively with the sharing by others. By contrast, actual behaviour in the ‘piracy game’ is not correlated with self-reported behaviour.     

Subsidizing charitable contributions: a natural field experiment comparing matching and rebate subsidies

We report the results of a field experiment conducted in conjunction with a mailed fundraising campaign of a nonprofit organization. The experiment is designed to compare the response of donors to subsidies in the form of matching amounts or rebated amounts. Matching subsidies are used by many corporations as an employee benefit; the US federal tax system encourages giving using a rebate subsidy by making donations tax deductible. The design includes a control group and two levels of subsidy of each type. Our main result is that matching subsidies result in larger total donations to charities than rebate subsidies, a result that is qualitatively similar to the lab findings. The estimated price elasticities for the matching subsidy are very similar to (and insignificantly different from) the lab experiments, while rebate subsidies lead to lower contributions in the field than in the lab. Since rebates in the field involve substantial lags and additional complications as compared with the “instant rebates” of the lab, this latter difference is not unexpected. The matching results are an important step in validating lab estimates of responsiveness to subsidies of charitable giving.

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Electronic Supplementary Material  The online version of this article () contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.      

The response to incentives and contractual efficiency: Evidence from a field experiment

We use data from a field experiment to estimate worker reaction to incentives and the optimality of piece-rate contracts. Our estimate of the elasticity of output with respect to piece rates is 0.39. Regression methods cannot predict performance under hypothetical contracts. Therefore, we apply structural econometric methods (without imposing profit maximization) to evaluate observed-contract optimality. Using profit as a metric, we estimate the distance between observed and profit-maximizing contracts to be negligible. This suggests that observed contracts closely approximate optimal contracts under asymmetric information about worker ability. Under complete information, the firm could increase expected profits by 14 percent keeping workers indifferent to the observed piece-rate contract. Profits could increase between 44 and 49 percent if the firm exploited information about ability to reduce worker utility to the outside alternative.     

Correction to: Framing effects on risk-taking behavior: evidence from a field experiment in multiple choice tests

Experimental Economics -     

Anchors,endorsements, and preferences: A field experiment

This study investigates how access to political endorsements affects stated preferences for an environmental public good in Switzerland. We developed a contingent valuation survey questionnaire with two valuation questions, the first formulated as a (hypothetical) policy referendum, the second an open-ended WTP question. For the referendum question we solicited endorsements from a range of political parties and relevant interest groups. We then conducted a split-sample mail-survey experiment in which a table listing the endorsements was included with a subsample of the questionnaires. Access to the policy endorsements significantly affected the responses to the open-ended willingness-to-pay question.     

Disentangling the sources of pro-socially motivated effort: A field experiment

This paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of workers' pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: warm glow altruism and pure altruism. We employ an experimental design that first measures the level of effort exerted by student workers on a data entry task in an environment that elicits purely selfish behavior and we compare it to effort exerted in an environment that also induces warm glow altruism. We then compare the latter to effort exerted in an environment where both types of altruistic preferences are elicited. We find evidence that women increase effort due to warm glow altruism while we do not find any additional impact due to pure altruism. On the other hand, men in our sample are not responsive to any of the treatments.     

More on money as a medium of exchange

Summary We extend the analysis of Kiyotaki and Wright, who study economies where the commodities that serve as media of exchange (or, commodity money) are determined endogenously. Kiyotaki and Wright consider only steady-state, pure-strategy equilibria; here we allow dynamic and mixed-strategy equilibria. We demonstrate that symmetric, steady-state equilibria in mixed-strategies always exist, while sometimes no such equilibria exist in pure-strategies. We prove that the number of symmetric steady-state equilibria is generically finite. We also show, however, that for some parameter values there exists a continuum of dynamic equilibria. Further, some equilibria display cycles.We thank the National Science Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation for financial support, as well as seminar participants at Stanford University, the London School of Economics, the Econometric Society World Congress in Barcelona, and the Conference on Monetary Theory and Financial Institutions at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis for their comments or suggestions. Alberto Trejos provided research assistance. The views expressed here are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System.     

Identifying significant characteristics of organic milk consumers: a CART analysis of an artefactual field experiment

The organic dairy category is one of the fastest growing categories of organic foods in the US. Organic milk consumers generally cite perceived health benefits and lower risk of food contamination, as well as perceived superior quality and environmental sustainability of organic farming methods, as the major motivations for preference of organic over conventional milk. While the attributes of organic milk that are valued by consumers are fairly well-known, more ambiguity exists regarding the demographic characteristics of the typical organic milk consumer. This research makes use of experimental data from 148 adult participants and use a Classification and Regression Tree (CART) analysis, a nonparametric modelling approach, to identify how Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) for organic milk varies with the demographic profile of experiment participants. The study finds that perceived taste of organic milk, concern for the risk of consuming conventional milk, being a primary shopper, and the quantity of milk consumed are the major factors that separate experiment participants into groups with high and low WTP for organic milk.