Measuring costly effort using the slider task

David Gill and Victoria Prowse

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: Using real effort to implement costly activities increases the likelihood that the motivations that drive effort provision in real life carry over to the laboratory. However, unobserved differences between subjects in the cost of real effort make quantitative prediction problematic. In this paper we present the slider task, which was designed by us to overcome the drawbacks of real-effort tasks. The slider task allows the researcher to collect precise and repeated observations of effort provision from the same subjects in a short time frame. The resulting high-quality panel data allow sophisticated statistical analysis. We illustrate these advantages in two ways. First, we show how to use panel data from the slider task to improve precision by controlling for persistent unobserved heterogeneity. Second, we show how to estimate effort costs at the subject level by exploiting within-subject variation in incentives across repetitions of the slider task. We also provide z-Tree code and practical guidance to help researchers implement the slider task.

Keywords: Experimental methodology; real effort; effort provision; cost of effort; slider task; design of laboratory experiments; unobserved heterogeneity JEL Classification: C91; C13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hrm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/382-2018_gill.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring costly effort using the slider task (2019)
Working Paper: Measuring Costly Effort Using the Slider Task (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:382

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