What Motivates Effort? Evidence and Expert Forecasts

Stefano DellaVigna and Devin Pope

No 22193, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: How much do different monetary and non-monetary motivators induce costly effort? Does the effectiveness line up with the expectations of researchers? We present the results of a large-scale real-effort experiment with 18 treatment arms. We compare the effect of three motivators: (i) standard incentives; (ii) behavioral factors like present-bias, reference dependence, and social preferences; and (iii) non-monetary inducements from psychology. In addition, we elicit forecasts by behavioral experts regarding the effectiveness of the treatments, allowing us to compare results to expectations. We find that (i) monetary incentives work largely as expected, including a very low piece rate treatment which does not crowd out incentives; (ii) the evidence is partly consistent with standard behavioral models, including warm glow, though we do not find evidence of probability weighting; (iii) the psychological motivators are effective, but less so than incentives. We then compare the results to forecasts by 208 experts. On average, the experts anticipate several key features, like the effectiveness of psychological motivators. A sizeable share of experts, however, expects crowd-out, probability weighting, and pure altruism, counterfactually. This heterogeneity does not reflect field of training, as behavioral economists, standard economists, and psychologists make similar forecasts. Using a simple model, we back out key parameters for social preferences, time preferences, and reference dependence, comparing expert beliefs and experimental results.

JEL-codes: C9 C93 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-pke
Note: LS PE PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Published as Stefano DellaVigna & Devin Pope, 2018. "What Motivates Effort? Evidence and Expert Forecasts," The Review of Economic Studies, vol 85(2), pages 1029-1069.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22193.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: What Motivates Effort? Evidence and Expert Forecasts (2018)
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:nbr:nberwo:22193

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22193

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().