Work for Image and Work for Pay

Roberta Dessi and Aldo Rustichini

No 683, IDEI Working Papers from Institut d'Économie Industrielle (IDEI), Toulouse

Abstract: Standard economic models with complete information predict a positive, monotonic relationship between pay and performance. This prediction does not always hold in experimental tests: offering a small payment may result in lower performance than not offering any pay- ment. We test experimentally two main explanations that have been put forward for this result: the "incomplete contract" hypothesis views the payment rule as a signal given to subjects on purpose of the activity. The "informed principal" hypothesis views it as a signal concerning the characteristics of the agent or of the task. The incomplete contract view appears to offer the best overall explanation for our results. We also find that high-powered monetary incentives do not "crowd out" intrinsic motivation, but may elicit "too much" effort when intrinsic motivation is very high.

Date: 2011-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cta, nep-exp, nep-hrm, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://idei.fr/sites/default/files/medias/doc/wp/2 ... ustichini_092011.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Work for Image and Work for Pay (2011)
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:ide:wpaper:24942

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDEI Working Papers from Institut d'Économie Industrielle (IDEI), Toulouse Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().