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This natural field experiment tests the effects of purely symbolic awards on volunteer retention in a public goods context. The experiment is conducted at Wikipedia, which faces declining editor retention rates, particularly among newcomers. Randomization assures that award receipt is orthogonal to previous performance. The analysis reveals that awards have a sizeable effect on newcomer retention, which persists over the four quarters following the initial intervention. This is noteworthy for indicating that awards for volunteers can be effective even if they have no impact on the volunteers' future career opportunities. The awards are purely symbolic, and the status increment they produce is limited to the recipients' pseudonymous online identities in a community they have just recently joined. The results can be explained by enhanced self-identification with the community, but they are also in line with recent findings on the role of status and reputation, recognition, and evaluation potential in online communities. History: Accepted by John List, behavioral economics. Open Access Statement: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt this work, but you must attribute this work as 'Management Science. Copyright [c] 2016 The Author(s). https://doi.org/10 .1287/mnsc.2016.2540, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License: https://creative commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.' Funding: The author acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Schweizerische Gemeinnutzige Gesellschaft, and the Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA), Switzerland. The experiment was reviewed and approved by the Research Directors of CREMA. Supplemental Material: Data and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ mnsc.2016.2540. Keywords: economics * behavior and behavioral decision making * public good provision * awards and motivation * natural field experiment * Wikipedia * online community management, 1. Introduction Wikipedia is an undisputed success story. It is the largest online encyclopedia, and its content is provided and cura ted by voluntary contributors (editors). As of May 2015, [...]

One explanation advanced for the persistent gender pay differences in labor markets is that women avoid salary negotiations. By using a natural field experiment that randomizes nearly 2,500 job seekers into jobs that vary important details of the labor contract, we are able to observe both the extent of salary negotiations and the nature of sorting. We find that when there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate for a higher wage, whereas women are more likely to signal their willingness to work for a lower wage. However, when we explicitly mention the possibility that wages are negotiable, these differences disappear completely. In terms of sorting, we find that men, in contrast to women, prefer job environments where the 'rules of wage determination' are ambiguous. This leads to the gender gap being much more pronounced in jobs that leave negotiation of wage ambiguous. Keywords: negotiation; field experiment; gender; labor market; sorting History: Received August 29, 2013; accepted March 20, 2014, by Gerard R Cachon, behavioral economics. Published online in Articles in Advance September 8, 2014., 1. Introduction Around the world, men occupy the higher ranks of society and are paid significantly more than women in the labor market (e.g., Bertrand 2010, Blau et al. 2010). [...]

In corporate practice, incentive schemes are often complicated even for simple tasks. Hence, the way they are communicated might matter. In a natural field experiment, we study a minimally invasive change in the communication of a well-established incentive scheme--a reminder regarding the piece rate at the beginning of the shift. The experiment was conducted in a large firm where experienced managers work in a team production setting and where incentives for both quantity and quality of output are provided. While the treatment conveyed no additional material information and left the incentive system unchanged, it had significant positive effects on quantity and on managers' compensation. These effects are economically sizable and robust to alternative empirical specifications. We consider various potential mechanisms, but our preferred explanation is that the treatment raised the salience of incentives. History: Accepted by John List, behavioral economics. Funding: The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the German Science Foundation [DFG, SFB/TR-151 and the European Commission [SCIFI-GLOW, Contract SSH7-CT-2008-217436]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2559. Keywords: incentives * attention * salience * communication * natural field experiment, 1. Introduction 1.1. Motivation Incentive schemes designed to enhance workforce performance are a key element of corporate personnel policy and have received considerable attention in academic research. In particular, a [...]

This paper investigates two channels of prosociality: indirect reciprocity and charitable giving. We conducted a natural field experiment in a hair salon in Hamburg, Germany, over the course of four months. In the baseline, we collected data on customers' tips--a scenario absent indirect reciprocity and donations. In two treatments we had the hairdresser collect donations to a charity. In one treatment the hairdresser pointed out the opportunity to donate. Our data indicate that the voluntary activity of collecting donations in the salon led to greater tips for the hairdresser and significant donations. In the second treatment, the hairdresser unconditionally donated to the charity before the customers could. This donation did not increase tips further compared with the collection-only treatment. Our data indicate that indirect reciprocity works in the field. We find evidence that indirect reciprocity and charitable giving work as complements. History: Accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics. Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2519. Keywords: indirect reciprocity * charitable giving * tipping * donation . natural field experiment, 1. Introduction Indirect reciprocity has been identified as a possible channel through which cooperative behavior has emerged as an evolutionary stable strategy in human societies (Nowak and Sigmund 1998, 2005). [...]

Recent discoveries in behavioral economics have led to important new insights concerning what can happen in markets. Such gains in knowledge have come primarily via laboratory experiments--a missing piece of the puzzle in many cases is parallel evidence drawn from naturally occurring field counterparts. We provide a small movement in this direction by taking advantage of a unique opportunity to work with a Chinese high-tech manufacturing facility. Our study revolves around using insights gained from one of the most influential lines of behavioral research--framing manipulations--in an attempt to increase worker productivity in the facility. Using a natural field experiment, we report several insights. For example, conditional incentives framed as both 'losses' and 'gains' increase productivity for both individuals and teams. In addition, teams more acutely respond to bonuses posed as losses than as comparable bonuses posed as gains. The magnitude of this framing effect is roughly 1%: that is, total team productivity is enhanced by 1% purely due to the framing manipulation. Importantly, we find that neither the framing nor the incentive effect lose their significance over time; rather, the effects are observed over the entire sample period. Moreover, we learn that repeated interaction with workers and conditionality of the bonus contract are substitutes for sustenance of incentive effects in the long run. Key words: framing effect; natural field experiment; worker productivity; loss aversion History: Received July 6, 2011; accepted February 3, 2012, by Gerard P. Cachon, decision analysis. Published online in Articles in Advance July 18, 2012., 1. Introduction One of the pillars within an entrenched branch of behavioral research is the power of framing: The manner in which a choice set is presented has been found [...]

We investigate behavioral reactions toward exogenous changes of implicit norm-relevant information in a natural field setting where customers are free to choose if and how much to pay for a service. Customers' voluntary payments are significantly affected by subtle information cues: cues that signal a high rather than a low payment norm increase payments by some 27%. Consistent with the conjecture that this effect is in large part driven by customers' uncertainty about the actual norm, responses are mitigated when explicit norm-relevant information is provided. Additional treatments suggest that the reactions to the cues are not driven by mere saliency but by the information deduced from the cues in the presence of uncertainty. History: Accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics. Funding: This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsge meinschaft) through the research unit 'Design and Behavior' [FOR 1371]. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2937. Keywords: uncertainty * social norms * pay-what-you-want, 1. Introduction The willingness to conform to norms is an important driver for voluntary payments. This has been shown, for instance, in the context of charitable donations. Donors respond to [...]

With a large nationwide retailer, we run a natural field experiment to measure the effects of energy use information disclosure, customer rebates, and sales agent incentives on demand for energy-efficient durable goods. Although a combination of large rebates plus sales incentives substantially increases market share, information and sales incentives alone each have zero statistical effect and explain at most a small fraction of the low baseline market share. Sales agents strategically comply only partially with the experiment, targeting information to more interested consumers but not discussing energy efficiency with the disinterested majority. These results suggest that seller-provided information is not a major barrier to energy-efficiency investments at current prices in this context. History: Accepted by John List, behavioral economics. Funding: The authors are grateful to the Sloan Foundation for funding this experiment and the related research on the economics of energy efficiency. Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2327. Keywords: energy efficiency * energy-using durables * information disclosure * randomized field experiments, 1. Introduction Consumers often learn about new or higher-quality products from firms, and in theory, information problems can be ameliorated as sellers of relatively high-quality products inform consumers of their [...]

Socially responsible investment is increasingly prevalent in financial markets and is characterized by the integration of financial and nonfinancial objectives. This paper investigates the influence of wealth concerns and moral concerns on individual investors' decisions to invest responsibly. We conduct a unique natural field experiment of investors in an online banking context, wherein we frame responsible investment with regard to either wealth or morality and study investors' subsequent behavior. We find that wealth framing is more effective than moral framing for both information search and investment behavior. Our study contributes to the literature by providing real-life insight into how prosocial decision making in financial markets can be promoted. Keywords: behavioral economics; field experiment; household finance; investor behavior; socially responsible investment History: Received April 16, 2012; accepted March 9, 2015, by John List, behavioral economics. Published online in Articles in Advance October 16, 2015., 1. Introduction Socially responsible investment (SRI) is increasingly prevalent in financial markets (see, e.g., Barber 2007, Eurosif 2012, Hong and Kostovetsky 2012, Renneboog et al. 2012). SRI refers to investments [...]

Recent studies, mostly from prosocial settings, suggest that monetary rewards may crowd out effort exertion by economic agents. We design a field experiment with data entry workers to investigate the extent of such crowding-out effects in a labor market. Using simple variations in the job description of a task, we induce a natural work setting under the work frame and emphasize social preference under the social frame. We find that crowding out of labor participation critically depends on framing--whereas small monetary rewards reduce the participation rate under the social frame, the participation rate is nondecreasing in the wage rate under the work frame. Moreover, among the workers who participate in the task, those who receive a positive wage perform a considerably higher amount of work than those who are paid zero wage under either frame. Thus, there is weak evidence of crowding out only when the task is explicitly given a prosocial flavor and not under a regular work setting. Furthermore, emphasizing social preference in the labor market in such a way reduces the overall labor supply and seems to have an adverse effect on the quality of work. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1807. Keywords: social preference; labor supply; crowding out; intrinsic and extrinsic motivations; natural field experiment History: Received June 27, 2012; accepted June 12, 2013, by John List, behavioral economics. Published online in Articles in Advance December 18, 2013., 1. Introduction Although traditional economic theory concentrates on monetary incentives as the main motivator behind decision making, anecdotal and experimental evidence suggests that extrinsic motivations may impair effort by economic [...]

Monetary Economics Members of the NBER's Monetary Economics Program met March 5 online. Research Associate Joshua K. Hausman of the University of Michigan, Faculty Research Fellow Arlene Wong of Princeton [...]

This paper presents the results from a 2.3-million-person field experiment that varies whether or not a job seeker sees the number of applicants for a job posting on a large job-posting website, Linkedln. This intervention increases the likelihood that a person will finish an application by 3.5%. Women have a larger increase in their likelihood of finishing an application than men. Overall, adding this information to a job posting may offer a light-touch way to both increase application rates and alter the diversity of the applicant pool. History: Accepted by John List, behavioral economics. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2994. Keywords: field experiment * labor search * social information * big data * gender * uncertainty * competition, 1. Introduction Both firms and job seekers expend a large amount of time and money attempting to match with each other. Understanding how job seekers decide to apply is useful. [...]

Direct-mail fundraisers commonly provide a set of suggested donation amounts to potential donors, in addition to a write-in option. Standard economic models of charitable fundraising do not predict an impact of suggested amounts on charitable giving. However, our field experiments on direct-mail solicitations to over 10,000 members of a public television station tell a different story. We find that changing one of the suggested amounts in an ask string from $100 to $95 reduces the number of gifts greater than or equal to $90 by more than 30%. This contrasts with our finding that in three independent comparisons, increasing the entire vector of suggested amounts by 20%-40% reduces the probability of giving by approximately 15%, with little effect on the average size of the gift. Both manipulations lead to a larger proportion of write-in donations, even as they reduce the number of total gifts. We propose a simple behavioral theory to explain the data: many donors prefer to give round numbers, and donors incur a cognitive cost when choosing to give a nonsuggested amount. (JEL C9, H4), I. INTRODUCTION Charitable giving continues to increase in economic importance, with $358 billion--over 2% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP)--contributed to charity in 2014 (Giving USA, 2014). (1) Charities spend [...]

We conduct a laboratory experiment in which participants can make donations to real charities. We vary whether the experimenter provides matching funds for any such donations, and whether there is individual or team competition for these matching funds. Our results indicate that providing matching funds for all donations does increase donations from 23% to 33% of the endowment. While individual competition for matching funds had nearly the same effectiveness as matching all donations, by far the most effective approach was to form (anonymous) teams that competed for matching funds; this led to donations of 47% of the endowment. We appeal to the notion of group identity to explain our results--participants seemed to be reluctant to 'let down their team' in a competition. Our results can be seen as providing support for the notion that combining group identity and competition creates a motivation that can potentially be harnessed effectively for prosocial purposes. History: Accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics. Funding: The Science of Philanthropy Institute graciously provided the funding for this experiment. Keywords: charitable contributions * laboratory experiment * matching funds * competition * team competition * group identity, 1. Introduction An issue of considerable economic importance is how to encourage philanthropic activity. In the United States, $324 billion was donated to charitable organizations in 2015, with more than [...]

Many online retailers provide real-time inventory availability information. Customers can learn from the inventory level and update their beliefs about the product. Thus, consumer purchasing behavior may be impacted by the availability information. Based on a unique setting from Amazon lightning deals, which displays the percentage of inventory consumed in real time, we explore whether and how consumers learn from inventory availability information. Identifying the effect of learning on consumer decisions has been a notoriously difficult empirical question because of endogeneity concerns. We address this issue by running two randomized field experiments on Amazon in which we create exogenous shocks on the inventory availability information for a random subset of Amazon lightning deals. In addition, we track the dynamic purchasing behavior and inventory information for 23,665 lightning deals offered by Amazon and use their panel structure to further explore the relative effect of learning. We find evidence of consumers learning from inventory information: a decrease in product availability causally attracts more sales in the future; in particular, a 10% increase in past claims leads to a 2.08% increase in cart add-ins in the next hour. Moreover, we show that buyers use observable product characteristics to moderate their inferences when learning from others; a deep discount weakens the learning momentum, whereas a good product rating amplifies the learning momentum. History: Accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management. Keywords: learning * inventory availability * field experiment * flash sales * Amazon * retail operations, 1. Introduction Flash-deal websites, such as Amazon's deals, Groupon, and LivingSocial, have emerged as a popular means of selling products online. Using these platforms, sellers can advertise their products by [...]

We present a lab-field experiment designed to systematically assess the external validity of social preferences elicited in a variety of experimental games. We do this by comparing behavior in the different games with several behaviors elicited in the field and with self-reported behaviors exhibited in the past, using the same sample of participants. Our results show that the experimental social preference games do a poor job explaining both social behaviors in the field and social behaviors from the past. We also include a systematic review and meta-analysis of previous literature on the external validity of social preference games. History: Accepted by John List, behavioral economics. Funding: M. M. Galizzi gratefully acknowledges funding from the Economic and Social Research Council [Future Research Leader Fellowship ES/K001965/1], D. Navarro-Martinez acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [MINECO-PSI2013-41909-P]. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2908. Keywords: field behavior * external validity * experimental games * social preferences, 1. Introduction The last few decades have seen a strong surge of interest in what is now widely known in economics as 'social preferences.' While the study of social behaviors [...]

Firms commonly undertake philanthropic campaigns as a means of attracting and retaining customers. Such campaigns often take the form of charity-linked promotions, whereby a firm donates a specific amount to a charitable cause when a customer takes up the promotion through a related purchase. We carried out three field experiments to study such promotions in the context of an online taxi-booking platform. Customers were randomly assigned to different treatment groups, which received either a charity-linked or a discount-based promotion from a range of monetary amounts. Take-up rates for charity-linked promotions were not only much smaller than for discount-based promotions but also less sensitive to the exact amount involved, consistent with a view that the decision to take up a charity-linked promotion was driven in part by a 'warm glow' from mere association with giving. We also find a selection effect in promotion take-up: charity-linked promotions were disproportionately taken up by people who had already been more active customers. Although a promotion take-up does seem to represent new demand rather than mere substitution of a booking that would have occurred anyway, longitudinal data analysis reveals little evidence of a lasting treatment effect on long-term demand beyond the promotion period for either kind of promotion. Given the high cost relative to benefit for the promotional bookings themselves, this finding raises concerns regarding the prevalent practice of firms devoting significant funds for short-term promotions without rigorously examining their exact impact. History: Accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics. Funding: This work was funded by the INSEAD Randomized Control Trials Lab and the INSEAD Research and Development Committee. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2887. Keywords: corporate philanthropy * corporate social responsibility * field experiments * customer behavior * online marketplaces, 1. Introduction The issue of how much corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities contribute to firm performance remains unresolved despite much academic debate (Margolis et al. 2009). Nevertheless, firms continue to [...]

Abstract. Many jobs are connected to a prosocial mission--namely, to a social purpose beyond profit maximization. I use three laboratory experiments to investigate if employers can use the mission to [...]

Abstract. Rank-order relative-performance evaluation, in which pay, promotion, symbolic awards, and educational achievement depend on the rank of individuals in the distribution of performance, is ubiquitous. Whenever organizations use rank-order [...]

We present a theory of how a rational, profit-maximizing firm would respond to pressure for gender pay equity by strategically distributing raises to reduce the pay gap between its female and male employees at minimum cost. Using formal analysis and pay data from a real employer, we show that (1) employees in low-paying jobs and whose pay-related observables are similar to those of men at the firm are most likely to get raises; (2) counterintuitively, some men may get raises, and giving raises to certain women would increase the pay gap; and (3) a firm can reduce the gender pay gap as measured by a much larger percentage than the overall increase in pay to women at the firm. We also identify the conditions under which a firm could 'explain away' a gender pay gap using other pay-related observables, such as job category, as well as the conditions under which this strategy would backfire. Our paper helps explain some empirical puzzles, such as the tendency for some men to get raises after gender equity pay reviews, and yields a rich set of implications for empirical research and practice. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1248. Keywords: gender pay gap * human capital management * discrimination * compensation * formal models, 1. Introduction After decades of progress, firms still seem to have trouble ensuring gender equity despite the benefits to firm performance from doing so (Eagly 2007, Dezso and Ross 2012). [...]

Abstract. We experimentally test how effort responds to wages--randomly assigned to accrue to individuals or to a charity--in the presence of expectations-based reference points or targets. When individuals earn money [...]

Can raising awareness of racial bias subsequently reduce that bias? We address this question by exploiting the widespread media attention highlighting racial bias among professional basketball referees that occurred in May 2007 following the release of an academic study. Using new data, we confirm that racial bias persisted in the years after the study's original sample but prior to the media coverage. Subsequent to the media coverage, though, the bias disappeared. Several potential mechanisms may have produced this result, including voluntary behavior changes by individual referees, adjustments by players to new information, and changes in referee behavior due to institutional pressure. These results suggest a new kind of Hawthorne effect in which greater scrutiny of even subtle forms of bias can bring about meaningful change. Keywords: behavioral economics * racial discrimination, 1. Introduction A recent stream of research has documented the existence of in-group racial biases in the employment, criminal, judicial, and educational settings (Donohue and Levitt 2001, Bertrand et al. [...]

We develop a model and derive behavioral predictions for a multiproduct sales force subject to goals set based on past performance. We test these predictions using a field experiment in which 53 salespersons from a Chilean beverage company face exogenous variations in monthly sales goals. Confirming our predictions, we found that (1) absent strategic considerations--no goal ratcheting--salespersons increase (decrease) sales in the product category for which the return to effort increases (decreases), (2) including strategic considerations behavior reverses: salespersons who expect high goal ratcheting decrease (increase) sales in the category for which the return to effort increases (decreases), (3) sales did not change for the average salespersons, reflecting heterogeneity in the expectations of goal ratcheting rather than unresponsiveness to incentives. Our study points at the importance of the dynamics of incentive design, in particular, the importance of understanding the dynamics of goal setting in firms. History: Accepted by Bruno Cassiman, strategy. Funding: J. Poblete acknowledges research support from the ISCI Institute [Grant CONICYT FB0816], the Institute for Research in Market Imperfections and Public Policy, [Grant ICM IS130002] and FONDECYT [Grant 11140525]. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2861. Keywords: incentives * strategic behavior * ratchet effect * field experiment, 1. Introduction How people respond to monetary incentives is a fundamental question for management scholars and practitioners. When workers evaluate an action in the presence of incentives, two considerations are [...]

Abstract. Tests of gift exchange, wherein agents receive excess wages which are noncontingent on performance in one-shot settings, have yielded contradictory evidence: they sometimes find effort boosts, consistent with gift [...]

Abstract. Is top-down organization design worth attempting at all, or should organizations simply let their members learn which patterns of interaction are valuable by themselves, through a bottom-up process? Our [...]

This study experimentally investigates gender quotas in light of peer review. We investigate competitions with and without gender quotas and a peer review process that allows for sabotage. Our findings show that the possibility of peer sabotage renders the gender quota ineffective in encouraging women to enter tournaments. Moreover, we provide evidence of a severe backlash against women, as they become targets of sabotage under gender quotas. Interestingly, this is the result of women focusing on sabotaging each other while men sabotage indiscriminately. Our results have implications for the use of quotas to mitigate the underrepresentation and underperformance of minority groups in environments in which peer sabotage is possible. History: Accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics. Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ mnsc.2017.2772. Keywords: affirmative action * gender quota * gender gap * labor market * sabotage * competition * tournament, 1. Introduction Women are significantly underrepresented in leadership positions (Bertrand 2010, Blau et al. 2010). For example, women represent less than 5% of the highest-paid executives in Standard & Poor's [...]

This study explores whether employees who have access to social media are more likely than employees who do not to develop shared cognition--similar perceptions of what and whom coworkers know. It also uncovers the behaviors associated with social media that allow employees to develop such shared cognition about their coworkers' knowledge and social structures. I conducted a multimethodological, longitudinal field study of the use of one type of social media--a social networking site--by employees at a large financial services organization. In this paper, I draw on comparative data from two matched-sample groups within the same organization to show that users of the social networking site developed their cognition through three interrelated processes--network expansion, content integration, and triggered recalling. Because all members of the organization enacted this process with data from the same common pool (content on the social networking site), their cognitions became shared. A difference-in-differences estimation showed that shared cognition developed much more strongly over six months in the group that used the social networking site than the group that did not use it. Funding: Funding for the research reported herein was generously provided by the National Science Foundation [Grants ACI-1322103 and SES-1331492]. Keywords: social media * shared cognition * technology * knowledge sharing * field experiment, Introduction Peyton is a senior marketing manager at a large financial services firm in the midwestern United States. She prides herself on being 'easy to get along with' in the [...]

Public relative performance feedback (RPF) on an individual worker's productivity metrics is used in various organizations with the hopes of improving worker productivity, but its effects are not well understood. We examine whether public RPF could be leveraged to facilitate adoption of best practices in an organization by enabling the validation of best practices shared by identifiable top performers. We use data from two emergency departments, both of which shared best practices for improving productivity and one of which changed from privately to publicly disclosing RPF to physicians. The public disclosure of RPF allowed workers to identify their top-performing coworkers, which in turn enabled the identification and validation of best practices within the work group. We find that the intervention is associated with a 10.9% improvement in physician productivity. We also find evidence for a significant reduction in variation in productivity across providers, which stems from bottom-ranked workers exhibiting differentially large improvements in productivity. These effects hold without sacrificing system- level performance, service quality, or worker attrition. Our results suggest that public disclosure of RPF, along with the validation of the best practices being shared, can improve worker productivity. History: Accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management. Funding: The authors acknowledge support from the Division of Research and Faculty Development at Harvard Business School. Supplemental Material: The online supplement is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2745. Keywords: productivity * workflow * relative performance feedback * social comparisons * best practice validation * empirical operations, 1. Introduction Improving workers' performance can be beneficial for organizations, but it is challenging to find--and to get workers to adopt--better ways of carrying out work. A potential lever, particularly [...]

Do monetary incentives encourage volunteering? Or, do they introduce concerns about appearing greedy and crowd out the motivation to volunteer? Since the importance of such image concerns is normally unobserved, the answer is theoretically unclear, and corresponding empirical evidence is mixed. To help counter this ambiguity, this paper proposes that the importance of image concerns--such as the desire to appear prosocial and not to appear greedy--relates to individuals' volunteer reputations. Experimental results support this possibility. Individuals with past histories of volunteering are less responsive to image concerns if their histories are public, or if their prosocial tendencies are already known. Consistent with a decreased importance of appearing prosocial, they are less likely to volunteer. Consistent with a decreased importance of not appearing greedy, they are less likely to be discouraged by public incentives. History: Accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics. Funding: The author gratefully acknowledges funding for this study from the National Science Foundation [SES1159032], Stanford's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, and Stanford's Economics department. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2685. Keywords: incentives * image motivation * reputations * volunteer * prosocial behavior, 1. Introduction With over a quarter of Americans volunteering annually at an estimated market value of $175 billion, understanding how to encourage volunteers to provide more help may yield significant [...]

In hopes of motivating consumers to provide larger volumes of useful reviews, many retailers offer financial incentives. Here, we explore an alternative approach, social norms. We inform individuals about the volume of reviews authored by peers. We test the effectiveness of using financial incentives, social norms, and a combination of both strategies in motivating consumers. In two randomized experiments, one in the field conducted in partnership with a large online clothing retailer based in China and a second on Amazon Mechanical Turk, we compare the effectiveness of each strategy in stimulating online reviews in larger numbers and of greater length. We find that financial incentives are more effective at inducing larger volumes of reviews, but the reviews that result are not particularly lengthy, whereas social norms have a greater effect on the length of reviews. Importantly, we show that the combination of financial incentives and social norms yields the greatest overall benefit by motivating reviews in greater numbers and of greater length. We further assess treatment-induced self-selection and sentiment bias by triangulating the experimental results with findings from an observational study. History: Accepted by Chris Forman, information systems. Funding: The first author acknowledges funding from the 3M Foundation. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2715. Keywords: randomized experiment * social norms * financial incentives * online reviews * intrinsic motivation, 1. Introduction Online reviews can serve as an excellent source of information for consumers to learn about peer opinions regarding various products and services (Dellarocas 2003). Although subject to certain [...]

We design a new procedure for measuring competitiveness and use it to estimate the magnitude of the gender gap in competitiveness. Before working on a task, participants choose what percentage of their payoffs will be based on a piece-rate compensation scheme; the rest of their payoff is allocated to a competitive compensation scheme. This novel procedure allows us to distinguish between 101 levels of competitiveness, as opposed to the binary measure used in the literature. Whereas the binary measure allows researchers to conclude that about twice as many men as women choose to compete (typically two-thirds versus one-third), the new procedure sheds light on the intensive margin. We find that the intensity of the preference is more extreme than the binary measure could detect. For example, we find that only one-fifth of the most competitive 25% of our participants are women, and the most competitive 10% of our participants are all men. The new procedure also allows us to study the correlation between competitiveness and parameters such as overconfidence, attitudes toward risk, and ambiguity. History: Accepted by Gerard Cachon, behavioral economics. Funding: This research was conducted under the Institutional Review Board [Research Approval Number 110022], and benefited from the financial support of internal funds at the Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego. Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ mnsc.2016.2673. Keywords: gender * competitiveness * behavioral economics, 1. Introduction In 2014, the number of female chief executive officers (CEOs) of Fortune 500 companies reached a historical high of 24 (or 4.8% of all CEOs). Although the increase [...]

How does priming identity affect charitable giving? We show that individuals are more likely to donate when a facet of their identity associated with a norm of generosity is primed in an appeal. In large charitable giving field experiments run by the American Red Cross, appeals that prime an individual's identity as a previous donor to the charity or as a member of a local community generate more donations. The primes are more effective when they highlight a facet of the potential donor's identity that we hypothesize to be more relevant to his sense of self: priming identity as a previous donor is more effective for more regular donors and priming identity as a local community member is more effective for people in smaller communities. Together, these results elucidate the impact of identity on behavior and demonstrate how identity primes can be implemented in practice to encourage public good provision. History: Accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2582. Keywords: economics * behavior and behavioral decision making * microeconomic behavior * utility preference * applications, 1. Introduction The role identity plays in decision making has begun to receive significant attention within economics. Recent work has formalized the idea that there are norms or prescriptions associated [...]

This paper studies the effects of unemployment benefit schemes on individual productivity. We created employment and unemployment in the field and compared workers' productivity under no unemployment benefits to productivity under two different unemployment schemes. In one scheme, the unemployed received an unconditional monetary transfer. In the other, the monetary transfer was obtained conditional on the unemployed spending some time on an ancillary activity. Our results challenge the standard economic theory prediction that unemployment benefits, especially unconditional compensations, hinder workers' effort. We find that workers employed under the unconditional scheme are more productive than workers under the conditional one, and both schemes make workers more productive than having no unemployment benefit. We discuss two possible explanations for our results based on reciprocity and differential psychological costs of unemployment across unemployment benefit schemes. History: Accepted by John List, behavioral economics. Funding: Financial support from the University of Rosario is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ mnsc.2016.2511. Keywords: unemployment benefits * productivity * psychological cost of unemployment * reciprocity, 1. Introduction This paper uses data from a novel empirical design to investigate whether and how the type of unemployment benefit system affects the productivity of workers. According to the [...]

We estimate and compare the effect of increased time costs on consumer satisfaction and behavior. We are able to move beyond the existing literature, which focuses on satisfaction and intention, and estimate the effect of waiting time on return behavior. Further, we do so in a prosocial context and our measure of cost is the length of time a blood donor spends waiting. We find that relying on satisfaction data masks important time cost sensitivities; namely, it is not how the donor feels about the wait time that matters for return behavior, but rather the actual duration of the wait. Consistent with theory we develop, our results indicate that waiting has a significant longer-term social cost: we estimate that a 38% increase (equivalent to one standard deviation) in the average wait would result in a 10% decrease in donations per year. History: Accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics. Funding: The authors greatly appreciate the generous financial support of the Australian Research Council [Grant 1095222] and the Australian Red Cross Blood Service (Blood Service) for their continuous support. Supplemental Material: The supplementary material is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ mnsc.2016.2504. Keywords: time costs * prosocial behavior * blood donation * return behavior * waiting * stated and revealed preferences, 1. Introduction We consider the role of time costs on economic behavior. Unlike many costs people face in everyday transactions that are observable to researchers, time costs are often ignored [...]

Employers and colleges value individuals with leadership service, but there is limited evidence on whether leadership service itself creates skills. Identification in this context has proved difficult because settings in which leadership service accrues to individuals for ostensibly random reasons are rare. In this study we estimate the effects of random assignment to classroom leadership positions in a Chinese secondary school. We find that leadership service increases test scores, increases students' political popularity in the classroom, makes students more likely to take initiative, and shapes students' beliefs about the determinants of success. The results suggest that leadership service may impact human capital and is not solely a signal of preexisting skills. Keywords: extracurriculars * classroom environment * student government, 1. Introduction Employers and colleges place a high premium on individuals with leadership service, but little is known about what types of skills, if any, leadership service creates. Individuals with [...]

We report an experiment to study the effect of defaults on charitable giving. In three different treatments, participants face varying default levels of donation. In three other treatments that are paired with the first three, they receive the same defaults, but are informed that defaults are thought to have an effect on their donation decisions. The emotional state of all individuals is monitored throughout the sessions using Facereading software, and some participants are required to report their emotional state after the donation decision. We find that the level at which a default is set has no effect on donations, and informing individuals of the possible impact of defaults also has no effect. Individuals who are happier and in a more positive overall emotional state donate more. Donors experience a negative change in the valence of their emotional state subsequent to donating, when valence is measured with Facereading software. This contrasts with the self-report data, in which donating correlates with a more positive reported subsequent emotional state. (JEL C91), I. INTRODUCTION Charitable giving, in the form of money, time, or in kind, constitutes a nonnegligible fraction of the economy in many countries. Nevertheless, there does appear to be scope [...]