Disentangling the Sources of Pro-social Behavior in the Workplace: A Field ExperimentMirco Tonin () and Michael Vlassopoulos () Discussion Paper Series In Economics And Econometrics from University of Southampton, Economics Division, School of Social Sciences Abstract:
Two sources of workers’ pro-social motivation have been considered in the literature: action-oriented altruism and output-oriented altruism. This paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify and quantify them. The idea behind our experimental design is to measure in a precise way the level of effort exerted in an environment that elicits purely selfish behavior and compares it to effort in an environment that also induces action-oriented altruism. We then compare the latter to effort exerted in an environment where both types of altruistic preferences are elicited. We find that action-oriented altruism accounts for a significant increase in effort, while there is no additional impact due to output-oriented altruism. We also find significant gender-related differences in the treatment effect: women are very responsive to the treatment condition eliciting action-oriented altruism, while men’s behavior is not affected by any of the treatments. There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:stn:sotoec:0901 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Discussion Paper Series In Economics And Econometrics from University of Southampton, Economics Division, School of Social Sciences |
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