Papers - Natural
Dean S Karlan,
John A List
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 29 
We conducted two matching grant experiments with an international development charity. The primary experiment finds that a matching grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation raises more funds than a matching grant from an anonymous donor. The effect persists, and is strongest for donors who previously gave to other poverty-oriented charities. Combining these insights with survey results, we conclude that our matching gift primarily works through a quality signal mechanism. Overall, the results help to clarify why people give to charity, what models help to describe those motivations, and how practitioners can leverage economics to increase their fundraising potential.
John A List,
Anya Samek,
Michael K Price
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 2
No abstract available
James Andreoni,
John A List
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 8
No abstract available
James Andreoni,
John A List
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 0
No abstract available
Steven Blader,
Claudine Gartenberg,
Andrea Prat
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 19
This paper investigates how the success of a management practice depends on the nature of the long-term relationship between the firm and its employees. A large US transportation company is in the process of fitting its trucks with an electronic on-board recorder (EOBR), which provide drivers with information on their driving performance. In this setting, a natural question is whether the optimal managerial practice consists of: (1) Letting each driver know his or her individual performance only; or (2) Also providing drivers with information about their ranking with respect to other drivers. The company is also in the first phase of a multi-year initiative to remake its internal operations. This first phase corresponds to an overhaul of the relational contract with its employees, focusing exclusively on changing values toward a greater emphasis on teamwork and empowerment. The main result of our randomized experiment is that (2) leads to better performance than (1) in a particular site if and only if the site has not yet received the values intervention, and worse performance if it has. The result is consistent with the presence of a conflict between competition-based managerial practices and a cooperation-based relational contract. More broadly, it highlights the role of intangible relational factors in determining the optimal set of managerial practices.
Sultan Orazbayev
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 2
Academic journal editors reject a significant portion of first submissions without sending them out for peer review. This decision, desk rejection, is made to reduce the workload on associate editors and referees, to give the submitting author a head start on revision or pursuit of an alternative venue, as well as to achieve quicker turnaround time for the journal. Desk rejection is a judgement based on the manuscript's perceived quality, impact and fit with the journal's scope. Could extraneous factors which are unrelated to the content of the manuscript, affect the editorial decision? This paper examines whether the sequential order in which manuscripts are submitted to a large academic journal affects the editorial decision. Becoming the first submission on the editor's list of manuscripts to review increases the probability of a desk rejection by up to 7% without any effect on the likelihood of a rejection after peer review.
Uri Gneezy,
Moshe Hoffman,
John A List
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 0
We therefore agree with the sentiments of Bailey et al. (1) and
Daly (2): Our study should not be viewed as the definitive study
on this topic but as a proof of concept, which should propel
researchers to exploit this unique sample to its fullest advantage.
Further research using noncognitive measures, as well as alternative
spatial measures would prove invaluable in addressing
some of the shortcomings pointed out by Bailey et al. (1) and
Daly (2). Moreover, such research would reveal the generality of
our results and could focus activist efforts on traits that are most
amenable to nurture. Also, if the measures are chosen to be
more or less gender-dimorphic and more or less influenced by
motivation, stereotype threat, and training, for example, this
research, in addition to addressing some of the astute criticisms
of Bailey et al. (1) and Daly (2), could also reveal mechanism,
which would likewise be invaluable for focusing activists' efforts.
We welcome collaboration with psychologists and anthropologists,
such as the experts to whom this letter replies, to help
us develop such measures of spatial and nonspatial cognitive
abilities that are easy to explain and quick to implement, to take
full advantage of this unique sample.
Fuhai Hong,
Tanjim Hossain,
John A List,
Migiwa Tanaka
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 29
Using a natural field experiment with factory workers where we introduce a quantity-based performance-pay scheme in addition to their base salary, we quantify the impact of one-dimensional monetary incentives on both incentivized (quantity) and non-incentivized (quality) dimensions of output. While the management typically observes only quantity, we also observe quality by hiring quality-inspectors unbeknownst to the workers. While some workers receive a flat-rate base salary, others receive a piece-rate base salary. We find sharp evidence that workers under a flat-rate base salary trade off quality for quantity. Interestingly, this quantity-quality trade-off is statistically insignificant for workers under a piece-rate base salary. This variation in the treatment effect is consistent with a simple theoretical model that predicts that when agents are already incented at the margin, the quantity-quality trade-off resulting from additional incentives will be less prominent.
Richard C Bishop,
Kevin J Boyle,
Richard T Carson,
David Chapman,
Matthew DeBell,
Colleen Donovan,
W. Michael Hanemann,
Barbara Kanninen,
Matthew Konopka,
Raymond J Kopp,
Jon A Krosnick,
John A List,
Norman Meade,
Robert Paterson,
Stanley Presser,
Nora Scherer,
V. Kerry Smith,
Roger Tourangeau,
Michael Welsh,
Jeffrey M Wooldridge
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 78
No abstract available
Jeffrey A Flory,
Andreas Leibbrandt,
John A List
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 109
Workplace misbehaviors are often governed by explicit monitoring and strict punishment. Such enforcement activities can serve to lessen worker productivity and harm worker morale. We take a different approach to curbing worker misbehaviour - bonuses. Examining more than 6500 donor phone calls across more than 80 workers, we use a natural field experiment to investigate how different wage contracts influence workers' propensity to break workplace rules in harmful ways. Our findings show that even though standard relative performance pay contracts, relative to a fixed wage scheme, increase productivity, they have a dark side: they cause considerable cheating and sabotage of co-workers. Yet, even in such environments, by including an unexpected bonus, the employer can substantially curb worker misbehavior. In this manner, our findings reveal how employers can effectively leverage bonuses to eliminate undesired behaviors induced by performance pay contracts.
John A List,
Fatemeh Momeni
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 82
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a cornerstone of modern business practice, developing from a "why" in the 1960s to a "must" today. Early empirical evidence on both the demand and supply sides has largely confirmed CSR's efficacy. This paper combines theory with a large-scale natural field experiment to connect CSR to an important but often neglected behavior: employee misconduct and shirking. Through employing more than 3,000 workers, we find that our usage of CSR increases employee misbehavior - 20% more employees act detrimentally toward our firm by shirking on their primary job duty when we introduce CSR. Complementary treatments suggest that "moral licensing" is at work, in that the "doing good" nature of CSR induces workers to misbehave on another dimension that hurts the firm. In this way, our data highlight a potential dark cloud of CSR, and serve to forewarn that such business practices should not be blindly applied.
Luca Fumarco
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 28
In this study, I show that with the appropriate experimental strategy, a correspondence test can be adapted to investigate disability discrimination in the rental housing market. I focus on discrimination against blind tenants assisted by guide dogs in Italy and obtain very robust results. The utilization of three fictitious household tenants (that is, a married couple, a married couple with a blind wife who owns a guide dog, and a married couple where the wife is normal sighted and owns a pet dog) allows me to investigate whether discrimination is due to the blindness or to guide dog alone. I find that apartment owners discriminate blind tenants because of the presence of the guide dog alone. According to the Italian law, this is indirect discrimination, which in the US corresponds to the refusal to provide reasonable accommodation.
Cody Cook,
Rebecca Diamond,
Jonathan Hall,
John A List,
Paul Oyer
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 60
The growth of the "gig" economy generates worker flexibility that, some have speculated, will favor women. We explore one facet of the gig economy by examining labor supply choices and earnings among more than a million rideshare drivers on Uber in the U.S. Perhaps most surprisingly, we find that there is a roughly 7% gender earnings gap among drivers. The uniqueness of our data - knowing exactly the production and compensation functions - permits us to completely unpack the underlying determinants of the gender earnings gap. We find that the entire gender gap is caused by three factors: experience on the platform (learning-by-doing), preferences over where/when to work, and preferences for driving speed. This suggests that, as the gig economy grows and brings more flexibility in employment, women's relatively high opportunity cost of non-paid-work time and gender-based preference differences can perpetuate a gender earnings gap even in the absence of discrimination.
Ufuk Akcigit,
Fernando Alvarez,
Stephane Bonhomme,
George M Constantinides,
Douglas W Diamond,
Eugene F Fama,
David W Galenson,
Michael Greenstone,
Lars Peter Hansen,
Uhlig Harald,
James J Heckman,
Ali Hortacsu,
Emir Kamenica,
Greg Kaplan,
Anil K Kashyap,
Steven D Levitt,
John A List,
Robert E Lucas Jr.,
Magne Mogstad,
Roger Myerson,
Derek Neal,
Canice Prendergast,
Raghuram G Rajan,
Philip J Reny,
Azeem M Shaikh,
Robert Shimer,
Hugo F Sonnenschein,
Nancy L Stokey,
Richard H Thaler,
Robert H Topel,
Robert Vishny,
Luigi Zingales
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 207
No abstract available
Orana Bandiera,
Iwan Barankay,
Imran Rasul
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 19
We present evidence from a firm level experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial compensation from fixed wages to performance pay based on the average productivity of lower-tier workers. Theory suggests that managerial incentives affect both the mean and dispersion of workers' productivity through two channels. First, managers respond to incentives by targeting their efforts towards more able workers, implying that both the mean and the dispersion increase. Second, managers select out the least able workers, implying that the mean increases but the dispersion may decrease. In our field experiment we find that the introduction of managerial performance pay raises both the mean and dispersion of worker productivity. Analysis of individual level productivity data shows that managers target their effort towards high ability workers, and the least able workers are less likely to be selected into employment. These results highlight the interplay between the provision of managerial incentives and earnings inequality among lower-tier workers.
Loukas Balafoutas,
Nikos Nikiforakis,
Bettina Rockenbach
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: None
Many interactions in modern human societies are among strangers. Explaining cooperation in such interactions is challenging. The two most prominent explanations critically depend on individuals' willingness to punish defectors: In models of direct punishment, individuals punish antisocial behavior at a personal cost, whereas in models of indirect reciprocity, they punish indirectly by withholding rewards. We investigate these competing explanations in a field experiment with real-life interactions among strangers. We find clear evidence of both direct and indirect punishment. Direct punishment is not rewarded by strangers and, in line with models of indirect reciprocity, is crowded out by indirect punishment opportunities. The existence of direct and indirect punishment in daily life indicates the importance of both means of understanding the evolution of cooperation.
Loukas Balafoutas,
Nikos Nikiforakis,
Bettina Rockenbach
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: None
The degree of human cooperation among strangers is a major evolutionary puzzle. A prominent explanation is that cooperation maintained because many individuals have a predisposition to punish those violating group-beneficial norms. A critical condition for cooperation to evolve in evolutionary models is that punishment increases with the severity of the violation. Here we present evidence from a field experiment with real-life interactions that, unlike in lab experiments, altruistic punishment does not increase with the severity of the violation, regardless of whether it is direct (confronting a violator) or indirect (withholding help). We also document growing concerns for counter-punishment as the severity of the violation increases, indicating that the marginal cost of direct punishment increases with the severity of violations. The evidence suggests that altruistic punishment may not provide appropriate incentives to deter large violations. Our findings thus offer a rationale for the emergence of formal institutions for prompting large-scale cooperation among strangers.
Tova Levin,
Steven D Levitt,
John A List
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 37
The wealthiest 10% of donors now give 90% of charitable dollars in the U.S., but little is known about what motivates them. This study uses a natural field experiment, tracking over five thousand high capacity donors, to lend preliminary insights into the world of high capacity givers. On some dimensions, high capacity donors mirror modal donors: there is persistence in giving patterns, signals of program quality influence giving, and the price of giving is not unduly important. Unlike typical small donors, the givers in our data respond only on the intensive margin, and often with a longer time lag. Our study highlights the value to practitioners of partnering with academics, as our intervention has generated $30 million in incremental donations to the University.
Jana Gallus
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 28
This natural field experiment tests the effects of purely symbolic awards on volunteer retention in a public goods context. The experiment is conducted at Wikipedia, which faces declining editor retention rates, particularly among newcomers. Randomization assures that award receipt is orthogonal to previous performance. The analysis reveals that awards have a sizeable effect on newcomer retention, which persists over the four quarters following the initial intervention. This is noteworthy for indicating that awards for volunteers can be effective even if they have no impact on the volunteers' future career opportunities. The awards are purely symbolic, and the status increment they produce is limited to the recipients' pseudonymous online identities in a community they have just recently joined. The results can be explained by enhanced self-identification with the community, but they are also in line with recent findings on the role of status and reputation, recognition, and evaluation potential in online communities.
Omar Al-Ubaydli,
John A List
Cited by*: 0 Downloads*: 60
A commonly held view is that laboratory experiments provide researchers with more "control" than natural field experiments, and that this advantage is to be balanced against the disadvantage that laboratory experiments are less generalizable. This paper presents a simple model that explores circumstances under which natural field experiments provide researchers with more control than laboratory experiments afford. This stems from the covertness of natural field experiments: laboratory experiments provide researchers with a high degree of control in the environment which participants agree to be experimental subjects. When participants systematically opt out of laboratory experiments, the researcher's ability to manipulate certain variables is limited. In contrast, natural field experiments bypass the participation decision altogether and allow for a potentially more diverse participant pool within the market of interest. We show one particular case where such selection is invaluable: when treatment effects interact with participant characteristics.