1,720,997 research outputs found
Sharing one’s fortune? An experimental study on earned income and giving
No full textIn this paper, we investigate the relationship between earnings and charitable giving, in an environment in which earnings depend on luck but not in a manner that makes its contribution obvious. We set up a real effort experiment, in which subjects enter data in four one-hour occasions and are paid a piece rate. From the second occasion onwards, we randomly assign half of the subjects to a treatment with higher piece rates, without the subjects being explicitly made aware of the random assignment into the two groups. At the end we ask subjects whether they want to donate a share of their earnings to a charity of their choice. We find that, despite large differences in earnings due to the different piece rates, subjects receiving the higher piece rate are actually less likely to give, and that givers in the two groups give the same share of their total earnings. Charities receive the same average donation from members of the two groups, indicating that charitable giving by subjects in this experiment does not increase with income. We discuss how these results can be explained by self-serving attribution bias
Corporate Philanthropy and Productivity: Evidence from an Online Real Effort Experiment
No full textContributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and nonprofit sectors as well as in firms that engage in corporate philanthropy or other corporate social responsibility policies. This paper compares the effectiveness of a social incentive that takes the form of a donation received by a charity of the subject's choice to a financial incentive. We find that social incentives lead to a 13% rise in productivity, regardless of their form (lump sum or related to performance) or strength. The response is strong for subjects with low initial productivity (30%), whereas high-productivity subjects do not respond. When subjects can choose the mix of incentives, half sacrifice some of their private compensation to increase social compensation, with women more likely to do so than men. Furthermore, offering subjects some discretion in choosing their own payment schemes leads to a substantial improvement in performance. Comparing social incentives to equally costly increases in private compensation for low-productivity subjects reveals that the former are less effective in increasing productivity, but the difference is small and not statistically significant
Disentangling the sources of pro-socially motivated effort: A field experiment
No full textThis paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of workers' pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: warm glow altruism and pure altruism. We employ an experimental design that first measures the level of effort exerted by student workers on a data entry task in an environment that elicits purely selfish behavior and we compare it to effort exerted in an environment that also induces warm glow altruism. We then compare the latter to effort exerted in an environment where both types of altruistic preferences are elicited. We find evidence that women increase effort due to warm glow altruism while we do not find any additional impact due to pure altruism. On the other hand, men in our sample are not responsive to any of the treatments. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
An experimental investigation of intrinsic motivations for giving
No full textThis paper presents results from a modified dictator experiment aimed at distinguishing and quantifying intrinsic motivations for giving. We employ an experimental design with three treatments that vary the recipient (experimenter, charity) and amount passed (fixed, varying). We find giving to the experimenter not to be significantly different from giving to a charity, when the amount the subject donates crowds out the amount donated by the experimenter such that the charity always receives a fixed amount. This result suggests that the latter treatment, first used by Crumpler and Grossman (J Public Econ 92(5-6):1011-1021, 2008), does not provide a clean test of warm glow motivation. We then propose a new method of detecting warm glow motivation based on the idea that in a random-lottery incentive (RLI) scheme, such as the one we employ, warm glow accumulates and this may lead to satiation, whereas purely altruistic motivation does not. We also provide bounds on the magnitudes of warm glow and pure altruism as motives that drive giving in our experiment
Are public sector workers different? Cross-European evidence from elderly workers and retirees
Full text linkWe investigate whether public and private sector employees differ in terms of public service motivation using a representative sample of elderly workers from 12 European countries. We find that public sector workers, both those currently employed and those already retired, are significantly more prosocial; however, the difference in prosociality is explained by differences in the composition of the workforce across the two sectors, in terms of (former) workers’ education and occupation. Subsample analysis reveals that public sector former workers in education are more prosocial even after controlling for a rich set of characteristics
Peer pressure and productivity: The role of observing and being observed
No full textPeer effects arise in situations where workers observe each others' work activity. In this paper, we disentangle the effect of observing a peer from that of being observed by a peer, by setting up a real effort experiment in which we manipulate the observability of performance. In particular, we randomize subjects into three groups: in the first one subjects are observed by another subject, but do not observe anybody; in the second one subjects observe somebody else's performance, but are not observed by anybody; in the last group subjects work in isolation, neither observing, nor being observed. To assess the importance of payoff externalities in the emergence of peer effects, we consider both a piece rate compensation scheme, where pay depends solely on own performance, and a team compensation scheme, where pay also depends on the performance of other team members. Overall, we find some evidence that subjects who are observed increase productivity at least initially when compensation is team based, while we find that subjects observing react to what they see when compensation is based only on own performance. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Scared or Naive? An Exploratory Study on Users Perceptions of Online Privacy Disclosures
No full textAs a result of various industry regulations service providers such as websites and app developers are required to explain the ways in which they process the personal data of service users. These “privacy disclosures”, which aim to inform users and empower them to control their privacy, take several forms. Among these forms are the privacy policy, the cookie notice and, on smart phones, the app permission request. The interaction problems with these different types of disclosure are relatively well understood – habituation, inattention and cognitive biases undermine the extent to which user consent is truly informed. User understanding of the actual content of these disclosures, and their feelings toward it, are less well understood, though. In this paper we report on a mixed-methods study that explored these three types of privacy disclosure and compare their relative merits as a starting point for the development more meaningful consent interactions. We identify four key findings – heterogeneity of user perceptions and attitudes to privacy disclosures, limited ability of users to infer data processing outputs and risks based on technical explanations of particular practices, suggestions of a naïve model of “cost justification” rather cost-benefit analysis by users, and the possibility that consent interactions are valuable in themselves as a means to improve user perceptions of a service
Paying for what kind of performance? Performance pay, multitasking, and sorting in mission-oriented jobs
No full textHow does pay-for-performance (P4P) impact productivity and the composition of workers in mission-oriented jobs when output has multiple dimensions? This is a central issue in the public sector, particularly in areas such as education and health care. We conduct an experiment, manipulating compensation and prosocial elements of the job, to answer these questions. We find that P4P has significantly smaller positive effects on productivity on the incentivized dimension in the prosocial setting relative to the non-prosocial setting. On the other hand, P4P generates no loss in performance on the non-incentivized dimension of effort in the prosocial setting, whereas it does so in the non-prosocial setting. In both settings, P4P attracts higher ability workers, but it does so at the expense of attracting prosocially-motivated workers in the prosocial setting
Exploring User Perceptions of Online Privacy Disclosures
No full textAs a result of various industry regulations service providers such as websites and app developers are required to explain the ways in which they process the personal data of service users. These “privacy disclosures”, which aim to inform users and empower them to control their privacy, take several forms. Among these forms are the privacy policy, the cookie notice and, on smart phones, the app permission request. The interaction problems with these different types of disclosure are relatively well understood – habituation, inattention and cognitive biases undermine the extent to which user consent is truly informed. User understanding of the actual content of these disclosures, and their feelings toward it, are less well understood, though. In this paper we report on a mixed-methods study that explored these three types of privacy disclosure and compare their relative merits as a starting point for the development more meaningful consent interactions. We identify four key findings – heterogeneity of user perceptions and attitudes to privacy disclosures, limited ability of users to infer data processing outputs and risks based on technical explanations of particular practices, suggestions of a naïve model of “cost justification” rather cost-benefit analysis by users, and the possibility that consent interactions are valuable in themselves as a means to improve user perceptions of a service
Symbolic incentives and the recruitment of volunteers for citizen science projects
No full textThe provision of activities with external benefits that rely on voluntary contributions may often fall below societal needs. In this article, we focus on such contributions to a citizen science project (the World Community Grid) in which members of the general public are asked to offer unused computer power to advance cutting-edge scientific research. We investigate the role played by symbolic awards in stimulating existing contributors to recruit new contributors for this project. The recruitment campaign we study introduces badges for referrals (visible on each user’s public profile page) varying, across randomized treatment groups, the threshold of successful referrals needed to receive these badges. We find that these symbolic incentives are effective in boosting referrals, and more so when the minimum threshold for achieving symbolic awards is higher. However, the overall effect of the incentives is quite modest, highlighting the challenges of running referral campaigns for the recruitment of volunteers
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