Using Behavioral Economic Experiments at a Large Motor Carrier: The Context and Design of the Truckers and Turnover Project

Stephen V. Burks, Jeffrey Carpenter (), Lorenz Götte (), Kristen Monaco (), Kay Porter and Aldo Rustichini ()
Additional contact information
Lorenz Götte: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and IZA
Kay Porter: Cooperating Motor Carrier
Aldo Rustichini: University of Minnesota
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Lorenz Goette ()

No 2789, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: The Truckers and Turnover Project is a statistical case study of a single firm and its employees which matches proprietary personnel and operational data to new data collected by the researchers to create a two-year panel study of a large subset of new hires. The project’s most distinctive innovation is the data collection process which combines traditional survey instruments with behavioral economics experiments. The survey data include information on demographics, risk and loss aversion, time preference, planning, non-verbal IQ, and the MPQ personality profile. The data collected by behavioral economics experiments include risk and loss aversion, time preferences (discount rates), backward induction, patience, and the preference for cooperation in a social dilemma setting. Subjects will be followed over two years of their work lives. Among the major design goals are to discover the extent to which the survey and experimental measures are correlated, and whether and how much predictive power, with respect to key on-the-job outcome variables, is added by the behavioral measures. The panel study of new hires is being carried out against the backdrop of a second research component, the development of a more conventional indepth statistical case study of the cooperating firm and its employees. This is a high-turnover service industry setting, and the focus is on the use of survival analysis to model the flow of new employees into and out of employment, and on the correct estimation of the tenureproductivity curve for new hires, accounting for the selection effects of the high turnover.

Keywords: field experiment; risk aversion; loss aversion; time preference; IQ; MPQ; numeracy; U.S. trucking industry; for-hire carriage; truckload (TL); driver turnover; employment duration; survival model; tenure-productivity curve (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C93 L92 J63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-ppm
Date: Written
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