Peer pressure and productivity: The role of observing and being observed

Sotiris Georganas, Mirco Tonin and Michael Vlassopoulos

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2015, vol. 117, issue C, 223-232

Abstract: Peer effects arise in situations where workers observe each others’ work activity. In this paper, we disentangle the effect of observing a peer from that of being observed by a peer, by setting up a real effort experiment in which we manipulate the observability of performance. In particular, we randomize subjects into three groups: in the first one subjects are observed by another subject, but do not observe anybody; in the second one subjects observe somebody else's performance, but are not observed by anybody; in the last group subjects work in isolation, neither observing, nor being observed. To assess the importance of payoff externalities in the emergence of peer effects, we consider both a piece rate compensation scheme, where pay depends solely on own performance, and a team compensation scheme, where pay also depends on the performance of other team members. Overall, we find some evidence that subjects who are observed increase productivity at least initially when compensation is team based, while we find that subjects observing react to what they see when compensation is based only on own performance.

Keywords: Peer effects; Piece rate; Team incentives; Real-effort experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 J24 M52 M59 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268115001778
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Peer Pressure and Productivity: The Role of Observing and Being Observed (2014)
Working Paper: Peer Pressure and Productivity: The Role of Observing and Being Observed (2013)
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:eee:jeborg:v:117:y:2015:i:c:p:223-232

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.06.014

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
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().