The incentive effects of missions—Evidence from experiments with NGO employees and students

Leonie Gerhards

European Economic Review, 2015, vol. 79, issue C, 252-262

Abstract: This paper studies the incentive effects of an organization׳s ‘mission’ on the effort provision of agents. Across treatments, I exogenously vary how much the agents׳ and their projects׳ missions match. In the first study, NGO employees are assigned the role of agents in an online, one-shot, principal-agent experiment. In the second study, I replicate the experimental design with a student subject pool. In both experiments the agents׳ effort choices are, for any given piece rate, increasing in their mission match. In a third study, a laboratory experiment with a finitely repeated principal-agent game with random matching, I do not find a motivational effect of missions, unlike in my first two studies.

Keywords: Mission motivation; Incentives; Online experiment; Laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C9 J3 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:79:y:2015:i:c:p:252-262

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2015.07.012

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