Does relative grading help male students? Evidence from a field experiment in the classroom

We conduct a framed field experiment at a Dutch university to compare student effort provision and exam performance under the two most prevalent evaluation practices: absolute (criterion-referenced) and relative (norm-referenced) grading. We hypothesize that the rank-order tournament created by relative grading will increase effort provision and performance among students with competitive preferences. We use student gender and survey measures (self-reported as well as incentivized) as proxies for competitiveness. Contrary to our expectations, we find no significant impact of relative grading on preparation behavior or exam scores, neither among men nor among students with higher measures of competitiveness. We discuss several potential explanations for this finding, and argue that it is likely attributable to the low value that students in our sample attach to academic excellence

Loss-Framed Incentives and Employee (Mis-)Behavior

This paper explores how loss-framed incentives affect behavior in a multitasking environment in which participants have more than one way of recovering (expected) losses. In a real-effort laboratory experiment, we offer participants task incentives that are framed as either a reward (gain) or penalty (loss). We study their responses along three dimensions: performance in the incentivized task, theft, and voluntary provision of help. We find that framing incentives as a penalty rather than as a reward does not significantly improve task performance, but it increases theft and leads to a small and insignificant reduction in the share of participants willing to help the experimenter. Secondary analyses based on our theoretical framework help us pin down the mechanism at play and suggest that loss aversion drives participants’ response. Our findings have important implications for incentive design in practice.David Jimenez-Gomez is grateful for the funding from the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Regional Development Fund [Grant PID2019-107081GB-I00], from the Ministry of Science and Innovation through the project “Nudging applied to the improvement of regulation” [Grant RED2018-102761-T], and from the Valencian Community through the Prometeo program [Grant PROMETEO/2021/073]