Material Incentives and Effort Choice: Evidence from an Online Experiment Across Countries

Marcel Fafchamps and Elwyn Davies

No 14283, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We conduct in the an interactive online experiment framed as an employment contract between employer and worker. Subjects from the US and India are matched in pairs within and across countries. Employers make a one-period offer to a worker who can either decline or choose a high or low effort. The offer is made from within a restricted and variable set of possible contracts: high and low fixed wage; bonus and malus contracts; and bonus and malus with reneging. High effort is always efficient. Self-interest predicts a fraction of observed choices, but many choices indicate conditional or unconditional cooperation instead. Indian subjects are more likely to play unconditional cooperation and provide high effort more often. US subjects are more likely to follow self-interest. Indian subjects reach a more efficient outcome than US subjects in 5 of the 6 treatments. Survey data on demographics and attitudes to incentives is unable to predict behavioral differences between the two countries, suggesting the possible existence of cultural differences in the response to labor incentives.

Keywords: Work incentives; Labor contracts; Intrinsic motivation; Conditional cooperation; Cross-country comparisons (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D9 J31 O12 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14283 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Material Incentives and Effort Choice: Evidence from an Online Experiment Across Countries (2022)
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:cpr:ceprdp:14283

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14283
orders@cepr.org

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (repec@cepr.org).