【主题】1. Team Incentives and Lower Ability Workers: An Experimental Study on Real-Effort Tasks
2. Socially Irresponsible Individual Information Reporting Behavior in a Pandemic: Underlying Traits and Interventions
【报告人】叶茂亮（研究员，南方科技大学）
【时间】2023年5月26日周五10:00-11:30
【地点】经济学院701会议室
【语言】英文
【摘要】1. Team incentives are important in many compensation systems that pay workers according to the output of their team as well as to their own output, with team bonuses often depending on whether the team meets or exceeds specified thresholds. Yet little is known about how team members with different abilities respond to compensation rules and thresholds as well as workers’ preferences regarding compensation rules. We contrast the performance of lower ability and higher ability participants in an experiment with three distribution scheme-equal sharing, individual piece rate, and tournament style winner-takes-all-in settings with and without a team threshold. Workers randomly assigned to equal sharing had higher productivity than those assigned to winner-takes-all and had similar productivity to workers in piece-rate pay. Output under equal sharing was boosted by the higher productivity of less able workers, possibly motivated by a desire to avoid guilt feelings about letting down their partners, per models of guilt aversion. Given a choice of distribution schemes, participants selected piece rate over equal sharing and favored both over winner-takes-all. In addition, a team threshold induced more concern about cooperation and thus greater preference for equal sharing. The findings suggest that organizations with teams of workers with varying abilities are likely to do better if the organizations’ incentive system has an equal sharing component for lower ability workers with a magnitude that depends on their (guilt aversion) responsiveness to equal sharing.
2. Problem definition: Citizens’ cooperative reporting of private information, e.g., contact history, symptoms, and medical test results, is crucial in the co-production between citizens and the administrations for stopping the spread of an infectious disease. Academic/practical relevance: Various socially irresponsible reporting behaviors, however, have been frequently observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. To date, little is known about what individual characteristics are associated with these behaviors and how to curb them using behavioral operations approach. Methodology: Combining naturally occurring administrative data with laboratory measures, our pre-registered study investigates the association between a comprehensive set of individual traits and various information reporting behaviors during the pandemic. Results: Our results indicate that prosociality traits, especially truth-telling preferences, strongly predict information reporting behavior in the field. Individuals who are more risk averse in the ethical, social, and health/safety domains also report more responsibly. Moreover, our behavioral interventions show that highlighting the social impact of uncooperative reporting can effectively mitigate it. Managerial implications: These findings suggest that the distribution of certain traits in the population largely matters for the spread of a pandemic and effectiveness of pandemic-fighting policies. Our results have rich descriptive and prescriptive implications for social operations in forecasting pandemic spread and making policies to fight it.