Collaborative Research: 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）资助的。了解工人对激励措施的反应对于提高企业生产率以及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。工人对这些方面的补偿的反应虽然重要，但尚未令人满意地量化，因为难以利用实地数据进行推断。具体而言，在实地研究中，通常很难发现同一个人从事同等工作却得到不同工资的情况，或者同一个人遭受不同程度的工资不平等的情况。该小组将进行旨在克服这些困难的实验，并确定不同工资制度与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作出反应，激励可以采取以下形式之一：（1）效率工资（即，高于工人的外部选择的固定工资）或（2）延迟补偿（即，一个倾斜的工资曲线，涉及最初的低工资，但在以后的生活中的高工资）。他们将研究个人的努力如何随着他们的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，以及员工自我选择某些类型的工作如何有助于解释不同人口群体之间的就业模式。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，即不同群体获得不同的努力回报。这条调查线将开始，试图量化个人的工作努力如何对不平等的存在作出反应，然后将继续研究不同的制度特征如何改变这些影响。个人如何应对不平等的问题对工作场所的激励措施很重要，但它也对更广泛的社会问题产生影响，如基于阶级的不平等、持续贫困和经济欠发达。

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.