Charisma and Multiple Effort Provision: A Field Experiment -- pilot stage
It is well documented in the economic literature that financial incentives in a multiple effort provision setting can have detrimental effects (see e.g. Holmstrom and Milgrom, 1991). For instance, incentivizing output effort alone can have unintended effects on an other non-incentivized effort, such as quality. While incentives may backfire, recent experimental work has shown that softer tools – such as charisma – may help when incentives perform poorly.
In this project, we study the performance of incentives and charisma (of a leader) in a real-effort task that requires exerting effort on both quantity and quality. In our study, temporary workers were hired to stuff envelopes for the mailing of a charitable organization in Lausanne. We vary the payment scheme (fixed wage vs piece-rate) and study its effect on the quantity-quality ratio. We report very preliminary data from the (very recent) pilot study.