Don't Ask Me If You Will Not Listen: The Dilemma of Participative Decision Making.

We study the effect of participative decision making in an experimental principalagent game, where the principal can consult the agent’s preferred option regarding the task to be undertaken in the final stage of the game. We show that consulting the agent was beneficial to principals as long as they followed the agent’s choice. Ignoring the agent’s choice was detrimental to the principal as it engendered negative emotions and low levels of transfers. Nevertheless, the majority of principals were reluctant to change their mind and adopt the agent’s proposal. Our results suggest that the ability to change one’s own mind is an important dimension of managerial success.organizational behavior, participative decision making, principal-agent model

Real Effort, Real Leisure and Real-time Supervision: Incentives and Peer Pressure in Virtual Organizations.

We propose a novel approach to the analysis of organizations by developing a computerized platform that reproduces relevant features of existing organizations such as real-effort tasks and real-leisure alternative activities (Internet). In this environment, we find strong incentives effects as organizations using individual incentives significantly outperform those relying on team incentives. Combining real-time peer monitoring with team incentives, we report striking evidence of positive peer effects as production increases by 50% and Internet usage decreases by 54% compared with organizations using team incentives alone. Peer monitoring allows virtual organizations using team incentives to perform as well as those using individual incentives. However, the positive effect of peer monitoring does not apply to low performers.team incentives, free-riding, monitoring, peer pressure, virtual organization

Don’T Ask Me If You Will Not Listen: The Dilemma Of Participative Decision Making

We study the effect of consultative participation in an experimental principal–agent game, where the principal can consult the agent\u27s preferred option regarding the cost function of the transfer to be implemented in the final stage of the game. We show that consulting the agent was beneficial to principals as long as they followed the agent\u27s choice. Ignoring the agent\u27s choice was detrimental to the principal because it engendered negative emotions and low levels of transfers. Nevertheless, the majority of principals were reluctant to change their mind and adopt the agent\u27s proposal. Our results suggest that the ability to change one\u27s own mind is an important dimension of managerial success. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1786

Peer Pressure and Moral Hazard in Teams: Experimental Evidence

Team incentives have been found to be particularly effective both in the lab and in the field despite the moral hazard in teams problem identified by Holmström (1982). In a newly developed virtual workplace, we show that, in line with Holmström, moral hazard in teams is indeed pervasive. Subsequently, we find strong evidence for the conjecture of Kandel and Lazear (1992) that peer pressure may resolve the moral hazard in teams problem. Organizations equipped with a very weak form of peer monitoring (anonymous and without physical proximity, verbal threats or face-to-face interactions) perform as well as those using individual incentives

The cognitive basis of social behavior: cognitive reflection overrides antisocial but not always prosocial motives

Even though human social behavior has received considerable scientific attention in the last decades, its cognitive underpinnings are still poorly understood. Applying a dual-process framework to the study of social preferences, we show in two studies that individuals with a more reflective/deliberative cognitive style, as measured by scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), are more likely to make choices consistent with “mild” altruism in simple non-strategic decisions. Such choices increase social welfare by increasing the other person's payoff at very low or no cost for the individual. The choices of less reflective individuals (i.e., those who rely more heavily on intuition), on the other hand, are more likely to be associated with either egalitarian or spiteful motives. We also identify a negative link between reflection and choices characterized by “strong” altruism, but this result holds only in Study 2. Moreover, we provide evidence that the relationship between social preferences and CRT scores is not driven by general intelligence. We discuss how our results can reconcile some previous conflicting findings on the cognitive basis of social behavior

Creativity and Cognitive Skills among Millennials: Thinking Too Much and Creating Too Little

Organizations crucially need the creative talent of millennials but are reluctant to hire them because of their supposed lack of diligence. Recent studies have shown that hiring diligent millennials requires selecting those who score high on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) and thus rely on effortful thinking rather than intuition. A central question is to assess whether the push for recruiting diligent millennials using criteria such as cognitive reflection can ultimately hamper the recruitment of creative workers. To answer this question, we study the relationship between millennials\u27 creativity and their performance on fluid intelligence (Raven) and cognitive reflection (CRT) tests. The good news for recruiters is that we report, in line with previous research, evidence of a positive relationship of fluid intelligence, and to a lesser extent cognitive reflection, with convergent creative thinking. In addition, we observe a positive effect of fluid intelligence on originality and elaboration measures of divergent creative thinking. The bad news for recruiters is the inverted U-shape relationship between cognitive reflection and fluency and flexibility measures of divergent creative thinking. This suggests that thinking too much may hinder important dimensions of creative thinking. Diligent and creative workers may thus be a rare find

Harnessing the Power of Social Incentives to Curb Shirking in Teams

We study several solutions to shirking in teams that trigger social incentives by reshaping the workplace social context. Using an experimental design, we manipulate social pressure at work by varying the type of workplace monitoring and the extent to which employees engage in social interaction. This design allows us to assess the effectiveness as well as the popularity of each solution. Despite similar effectiveness in boosting productivity across solutions, only organizational systems involving social interaction (via chat) were at least as popular as a baseline treatment. This suggests that any solution based on promoting social interaction is more likely to be embraced by workers than monitoring systems alone

The Effect Of Earned Vs. House Money On Price Bubble Formation In Experimental Asset Markets

Does house money exacerbate price bubbles? We compare house money asset market experiments with an earned money treatment where initial portfolios are constructed from a real effort task. Bubbles occur; however, trading volumes and earnings dispersion are significantly higher with house money. We investigate the role of cognitive ability in accounting for the differences in earnings distribution across treatments by using the cognitive reflection test (CRT). Low CRT subjects earned less than high CRT subjects. Low CRT subjects were net purchasers (sellers) of shares when the price was above (below) fundamental value. The opposite was true for high CRT subjects

Surf’s Up : Reducing Internet Abuse Without Demotivating Employees

International audienceCyberloafing represents a serious organizational problem. The current research compared the objective and subjective effects of the standard "top-down" solution with the effects of two "horizontal" solutions. This proceedings version presents a much-abbreviated version of the introduction, hypotheses, studies, and results. The full manuscript provides additional detail. <br/

Institutions and Opportunistic Behavior: Experimental Evidence

Risk mitigating institutions have long been used by societies to protect against opportunistic behavior. We know little about how they are demanded, who demands them or how they impact subsequent behavior. To study these questions, we run a large-scale online experiment where insurance can be purchased to safeguard against opportunistic behavior. We compare two different selection mechanisms for risk mitigation, the individual and the collective (voting). We find that, whether individual or collective, there is demand for riskmitigating institutions amongst high-opportunism individuals, while low-opportunism individuals demand lesser levels of insurance. However, high-opportunism individuals strategically demand lower insurance institutions when they are chosen collectively through voting. We also find that the presence of risk mitigating institutions crowds out reciprocity. Reciprocity is lower when the no-insurance option is chosen among other insurance options than when it is not available. Finally, we also observe higher gains from exchange in lowopportunism groups than in more opportunistic ones