 Incentivizing interdependent tasks: Evidence from a real-effort experimentLorenz Goette and Julien Senn Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2024, vol. 227, issue C Abstract: Workers are often required to jointly work on interdependent tasks that are cognitively complex. Yet, relatively little empirical evidence exists on how to effectively incentivize the workforce in such settings. Using a novel real-effort experiment, we assess the effects of team-based incentives (TBI) and individual-based incentives (IBI) on productivity. We provide evidence that TBI yield higher productivity than IBI, both when holding the incentives for the worker constant, and when holding the marginal cost of output for the firm constant. Various measures point towards workers engaging in lower quality work under IBI. We also provide new evidence that performance does not necessarily increase with the size of the monetary rewards. Overall, these results underscore the benefits of incentivizing the workforce in teams in settings in which workers’ payoff are interdependent and tasks are complex. Keywords: Incentives; Productivity; Piece rate; Team reward (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:227:y:2024:i:c:s0167268124003329 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2024.106718 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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