Authors
Stefano DellaVigna, Devin Pope
Publication date
2018/4/1
Journal
The Review of Economic Studies
Volume
85
Issue
2
Pages
1029-1069
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Description
How much do different monetary and non-monetary motivators induce costly effort? Does the effectiveness line up with the expectations of researchers and with results in the literature? We conduct a large-scale real-effort experiment with eighteen treatment arms. We examine the effect of (1) standard incentives; (2) behavioural factors like social preferences and reference dependence; and (3) non-monetary inducements from psychology. We find that (1) monetary incentives work largely as expected, including a very low piece rate treatment which does not crowd out effort; (2) the evidence is partly consistent with standard behavioural models, including warm glow, though we do not find evidence of probability weighting; (3) the psychological motivators are effective, but less so than incentives. We then compare the results to forecasts by 208 academic experts. On average, the experts anticipate several key …
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