Procedural preferences for autonomy: an experimental study with Colombian workers

Laura Prada-Medina, César Mantilla and Darwin Cortés

No s7tcb, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: We document how the procedure of allocating barely identical tasks among team members affects productivity and the willingness to pay for repeating the job alone rather than in teams. We find a complementarity relation between the assignment procedure (by-choice, imposed by a third party with a higher hierarchy, or random) and the preferences about the task to perform. For participants in the Imposed mechanism, being assigned to a preferred task increases performance, while being imposed on a non-preferred task negatively affects performance. Moreover, we find that the participants who were more interested in paying for autonomy were those randomly assigned to be autonomous (by-choice) at the beginning of the experiment. Hence, these results suggest that people care about factors beyond payoffs, such as autonomy. Among self-employed workers, the effect on the productivity of being imposed on a non-preferred task is exacerbated, and we did not find any statistical impact on the willingness to pay for playing alone.

Date: 2022-11-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/6386157b723a111dad18d3a4/

Related works:
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:osf:osfxxx:s7tcb

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/s7tcb

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().