Working Hard or Working Smart?

Anat Bracha and Chaim Fershtman

No 275740, Foerder Institute for Economic Research Working Papers from Tel-Aviv University > Foerder Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: Almost all jobs require a combination of cognitive effort and labor effort. The focus of the paper is on the effect of different incentive schemes on the chosen combination of these types of efforts. We use an experimental approach to show that tournament incentives may induce agents to work harder but not necessarily smarter. This effect was stronger for women. We then ran a "managerial bonus" experiment in which a preassigned manager receives a bonus whenever the overall performance of his/her group is above a given threshold level. Although the bonus does not affect the participants' direct incentives, it induces participants to lower their cognitive effort and increase their labor effort.

Keywords: Financial Economics; Labor and Human Capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21
Date: 2018-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/275740/files/2-2011.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:isfiwp:275740

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.275740

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Foerder Institute for Economic Research Working Papers from Tel-Aviv University > Foerder Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().