Incentives in the Workplace: An Experimental Examination of How Wage Differences Across Time and Among Peers Affect Productivity and Self-Selection

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(公法111-5)提供资金的。了解工人对激励措施的反应对于提高企业生产率和经济的整体效率至关重要。该提案中的项目涉及进行经济实验，以更好地了解个人如何应对终身工资状况，以及他们如何应对同龄人之间的工资不平等。虽然很重要，但由于难以使用现场数据进行推断，工人对这些补偿方面的反应尚未得到令人满意的量化。具体地说，在实地研究中，通常很难发现同一人在其他相同的工作中得到不同的工资概况，或者受到不同程度的工资不平等的情况。该团队将进行旨在克服这些困难的实验，并确定不同工资制度和工作场所生产率之间的因果关系。第一组项目涉及确定个人如何随着时间的推移对激励做出反应，其形式可以是(1)效率工资(即，高于工人外部选择的固定工资)或(2)递延补偿(即，涉及低初始工资但后来高工资的倾斜工资概况)。他们将研究个人的努力如何随其补偿计划的性质而变化。他们还将试图了解不同薪酬方案之间的个人偏好的性质。这一系列调查的结果将揭示如何最好地激励员工产生最佳的工作努力，以及如何让员工自我选择某些类型的工作，这可能有助于解释不同人口群体的就业模式。第二个研究领域将侧重于个人如何应对结构性不平等的存在，即不同群体的努力获得了不同的回报。这一系列调查将从试图量化个人的工作努力如何应对不平等的存在开始，然后将继续研究不同的机构特征如何改变这些影响。个人如何应对不平等的问题对于职场激励很重要，但它也影响到更广泛的社会问题，如基于阶级的不平等、持续的贫困和经济不发达。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Understanding workers' responses to incentives is critical to enhancing firm productivity as well as the overall efficiency of an economy. The projects in this proposal involve conducting economic experiments to provide a better understanding of how individuals respond to life-time wage profiles as well as how they respond to wage inequality among peers. While important, workers' responses to these aspects of compensation have not yet been satisfactorily quantified because of difficulties in making inference using field data. Specifically, in field studies it is usually difficult to find circumstances in which the same individual is offered different wage profiles for otherwise equivalent jobs, or is subjected to differing levels of wage inequality. This team will conduct experiments that are designed to overcome such difficulties and identify causal relationships between different wage institutions and workplace productivity. The first set of projects involve determining how individuals respond to incentives over time, which can take the form of either (1) efficiency wages (i.e., a constant wage above the worker's outside option) or (2) deferred compensation (i.e., a sloped wage profile involving low initial wages but high wages later in life). They will examine how individuals'effort varies with the nature of their compensation scheme. They will also attempt to understand the nature of individual preferences between different compensation schemes. The results from this line of inquiry will shed light on how best to motivate employees to generate optimal work effort as well as how self-selection of employees into certain types of jobs may help explain employment patterns among different demographic groups. The second area of study will be focused on how individuals respond to the existence of structural inequality in the form of different groups receiving differing returns on effort. This line of inquiry will begin by attempting to quantify how work effort of individuals responds to the existence of inequality and will then continue by looking into how different institutional characteristics alter those effects. This issue of how individuals respond to inequality is important for workplace incentives but it also has implications for broader social issues such as class-based inequality, persistent poverty and economic underdevelopment.