Pay Attention or Be Paid for Attention? Impact of Incentives on Allocation of Attention

Ismaël Rafaï () and Mira Toumi ()

No 2017-11, GREDEG Working Papers from Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France

Abstract: We investigate the impact of monetary incentives on individual attention allocation. We propose a new experimental design where the participants invest costly attention to reduce uncertainty in a two alternatives forced choice task. We compare three different incentivized environments where subjects' decisions do not impact the payoff (T0), impact their own payoff (T1) and impact other subjects' payoff (T2). Our results show that both incentives (T1) and (T2) increase the amount of allocated attention (measured by Response Time), besides the efficiency of the allocation process (measured by Error Rate) and regardless of subjects’ intrinsic motivation. Finally, we find that standard measure of social preferences (Social Value Orientation) do not explain attentional contribution in our Public Good like environment (T2). This latter result contradicts standard ones, providing new insight about social preferences.

Keywords: Allocation of attention; Incentives; Public Good Game; Social Preferences; Intrinsic Motivation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 C9 D8 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2017-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-upt
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gre:wpaper:2017-11

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