Feedback and Incentives : Experimental Evidence

This paper experimentally investigates the impact of different pay and relative performance information policies on employee effort. We explore three information policies: No feedback about relative performance, feedback given halfway through the production period, and continuously updated feedback. The pay schemes are a piece rate payment scheme and a winner-takes-all tournament. We find that, regardless of the pay scheme used, feedback does not improve performance. There are no significant peer effects in the piece-rate pay scheme. In contrast, in the tournament scheme we find some evidence of positive peer effects since the underdogs almost never quit the competition even when lagging significantly behind, and frontrunners do not slack off. Moreover, in both pay schemes information feedback reduces the quality of the low performers' work.evaluation ; feedback ; information ; laboratory experiments ; peer effects ; performance pay ; piece rate ; tournament

Employment Contracts and Stress : Experimental Evidence

Funding Information: Notes: Authors are listed in alphabetical order. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Scottish Economic Society on the pilot study and from the ESRC (Grant ES/R01163X/1). We also extend our thanks to Matthew McGinty, Christine Spencer and participants at the 2020 EALE/SOLE/AASLE World Conference, 2021 GLO Research Seminars, 2021 SES Conference, 2021 ICBM Conference, the Economics Centre at Curtin University, the Economics Department at St Lawrence University and the Applied Health Psychology Research Workshop and Business School at the University of Aberdeen who provided thoughtful comments on an early draft of the current manuscript. Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained from the University of Aberdeen, College of Life Sciences & Medicine Ethics Review Board (CERB/2015/5/1198). The study was pre-registered with the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/sxkb2 ) prior to data collection. Funding Information: ? Notes: Authors are listed in alphabetical order. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Scottish Economic Society on the pilot study and from the ESRC (Grant ES/R01163X/1). We also extend our thanks to Matthew McGinty, Christine Spencer and participants at the 2020 EALE/SOLE/AASLE World Conference, 2021 GLO Research Seminars, 2021 SES Conference, 2021 ICBM Conference, the Economics Centre at Curtin University, the Economics Department at St Lawrence University and the Applied Health Psychology Research Workshop and Business School at the University of Aberdeen who provided thoughtful comments on an early draft of the current manuscript. Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained from the University of Aberdeen, College of Life Sciences & Medicine Ethics Review Board (CERB/2015/5/1198). The study was pre-registered with the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/sxkb2) prior to data collection. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Elsevier B.V.Peer reviewedPostprin

Ingratiation: Experimental Evidence

We investigate experimentally ingratiatory behavior expressed by opinion conformity. Both individuals' performance at a task and their opinions on various topics can be observed before unequal payoffs are assigned by a second mover. In some treatments, first movers can change their opinion after learning that held by the second mover. We find evidence of high ingratiation indices, as opinion conformity is rewarded. However, second movers reward conformity less when it is common knowledge that opinions can be manipulated strategically. Introducing a monetary cost for changing opinion reduces ingratiation. Introducing performance-related pay for the second mover makes ingratiation less rewarding but does not eliminate it completely. Reducing the noise in the measurement of ability has little effect

Social Preferences and Strategic Uncertainty: An Experiment on Markets and Contracts

This paper reports experimental evidence on a stylized labor market. The experiment is designed as a sequence of three phases. In the rst two phases, P1 and P2; agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects social and reciprocity concerns, together with their beliefs. In the last phase, P3; four principals, who face four teams of two agents, compete by o¤ering agents a contract from a xed menu. Then, each agent selects one of the available contracts (i.e. he "chooses to work" for a principal). Production is determined by the outcome of a simple effort game induced by the chosen contract. We nd that (heterogeneous) social preferences are signi cant determinants of choices in all phases of the experiment. Since the available contracts display a trade-of between fairness and strategic uncertainty, we observe that the latter is a much stronger determinant of choices, for both principals and agents. Finally, we also see that social preferences explain, to a large extent, matching between principals and agents, since agents display a marked propensity to work for principals with similar social preferences

Social Preferences and Strategic Uncertainty: An Experiment on Markets and Contracts

This paper reports experimental evidence on a stylized labor market. The experiment is designed as a sequence of three phases. In the rst two phases, P1 and P2; agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects social and reciprocity concerns, together with their beliefs. In the last phase, P3; four principals, who face four teams of two agents, compete by o¤ering agents a contract from a xed menu. Then, each agent selects one of the available contracts (i.e. he "chooses to work" for a principal). Production is determined by the outcome of a simple effort game induced by the chosen contract. We nd that (heterogeneous) social preferences are signi cant determinants of choices in all phases of the experiment. Since the available contracts display a trade-of between fairness and strategic uncertainty, we observe that the latter is a much stronger determinant of choices, for both principals and agents. Finally, we also see that social preferences explain, to a large extent, matching between principals and agents, since agents display a marked propensity to work for principals with similar social preferences