The Effectiveness of Incentive Schemes in the Presence of Implicit Effort Costs

Agents’ decisions to exert effort depend on the incentives and the potential costs involved. So far, most of the attention has been on the incentive side. However, our laboratory experiments underline that both the incentive and the cost side can be used separately to shape work performance. In our experiment, subjects work on a real-effort slider task. Between treatments, we vary the incentive scheme used for compensating workers. Additionally, by varying the available outside options, we explore the role of implicit costs of effort in determining workers’ performance. We observe that incentive contracts and implicit costs interact in a nontrivial manner. In general, performance decreases as implicit costs increase. Yet the magnitude of the reaction differs across incentive schemes and across the offered outside options, which, in turn, alters estimated output elasticities. In addition, comparisons between incentive schemes crucially depend on the implicit costs.

This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.