The slider task: an example of restricted inference on incentive effects

Felipe A. Araujo, Erin Carbone, Lynn Conell-Price, Marli Dunietz, Ania Jaroszewicz, Rachel Landsman (), Diego Lamé, Lise Vesterlund, Stephanie Wang and Alistair Wilson
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Felipe A. Araujo: University of Pittsburgh
Erin Carbone: University of Pittsburgh
Lynn Conell-Price: Carnegie Mellon University
Ania Jaroszewicz: Carnegie Mellon University
Diego Lamé: University of Pittsburgh

Journal of the Economic Science Association, 2016, vol. 2, issue 1, No 1, 12 pages

Abstract: Abstract Real-effort experiments are frequently used when examining a response to incentives. For a real-effort task to be well suited for such an exercise its measurable output must be sufficiently elastic over the incentives considered. The popular slider task in Gill and Prowse (Am Econ Rev 102(1):469–503, 2012) has been characterized as satisfying this requirement, and the task is increasingly used to investigate the response to incentives. However, a between-subject examination of the slider task’s response to incentives has not been conducted. We provide such an examination with three different piece-rate incentives: half a cent, two cents, and eight cents per slider completed. We find only a small increase in performance: despite a 1500 % increase in the incentives, output only increases by 5 %. With such an inelastic response we caution that for typical experimental sample sizes and incentives the slider task is unlikely to demonstrate a meaningful and statistically significant performance response.

Keywords: Real-effort; Slider task; Incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D01 J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (68)

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DOI: 10.1007/s40881-016-0025-7

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