Age differences in the reaction to incentives – do older people avoid competition?

Alec N. Sproten and Christiane Schwieren

No 522, Working Papers from University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics

Abstract: The “aging employee” has recently become a hot topic in many fields of behavioural research. With the aim to determine the effects of different incentive schemes (competition, social or increased monetary incentives) on performance of young and older subjects, we look at behaviour of a group of younger and older adults on a well-established real effort task. We show that older adults differ from younger adults in their performance in all conditions, but not in the improvement between conditions. The age difference in performance is however driven by women. While we replicate the gender difference in competitiveness found in the literature, we do not find a significant age difference in competitiveness. Social incentives have an at least as strong or even stronger effect on performance than increased monetary incentives. This effect is driven by men; women do not show an increase in performance with social incentives.

Keywords: aging; competition; social production functions; experiment; incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 J10 J33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-02-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-cbe, nep-dem, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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