Do Monetary Incentives Undermine Performance on Intrinsically Enjoyable Tasks? A Field Test

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-46
Author(s):  
Constança Esteves-Sorenson ◽  
Robert Broce

Economists have long been intrigued by an influential literature in psychology positing that monetary pay lowers performance on enjoyable tasks by crowding out agents' intrinsic interest in them. But typical experiments in this literature do not report a full set of performance metrics, which might reveal conflicting evidence on crowding out. Further, they may suffer from confounds. To evaluate these issues, we review over 100 prior tests and run a field experiment building on the canonical two-session test for crowding out wherein agents receive pay for an interesting activity in session one that is withdrawn unexpectedly in session two. We test whether pay harms performance using a comprehensive set of performance measures, and if so, whether unmet pay expectations might also contribute to this decline. Our results on output, productivity and quits are most consistent with a standard economics model than with a crowding out one. Additional, though more speculative, evidence suggests that unmet pay expectations may harm output quality.

Author(s):  
Lauren-Brooke Eisen ◽  
Miriam Aroni Krinsky

Local prosecutors are responsible for 95 percent of criminal cases in the United States—their charging decisions holding enormous influence over the number of people incarcerated and the length of sentences served. Performance metrics are a tool that can align the vision of elected prosecutors with the tangible actions of their offices’ line attorneys. The right metrics can provide clarity to individual line attorneys around the mission of the office and the goals of their job. Historically, however, prosecutor offices have relied on evaluation metrics that incentivize individual attorneys to prioritize more punitive responses and volume-driven activity—such as tracking the number of cases processed, indictments, guilty pleas, convictions, and sentence lengths. Under these past approaches, funding, budgeting, and promotional decisions are frequently linked to regressive measures that fail to account for just results. As more Americans have embraced the need to end mass incarceration, a new wave of reform-minded district attorneys have won elections. To ensure they are accountable to the voters who elected them into office and achieve the changes they championed, they must align measures of success with new priorities for their offices. New performance metrics predicated on the goals of reducing incarceration and enhancing fairness can shrink prison and jail populations, while improving public trust and promoting healthier and safer communities. The authors propose a new set of metrics for elected prosecutors to consider in designing performance evaluations, both for their offices and for individual attorneys. The authors also suggest that for these new performance measures to effectively drive decarceration practices, they must be coupled with careful, thoughtful implementation and critical data-management infrastructure.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-142
Author(s):  
Shamsulhadi Bandi

An assessment of IJBES's performance since 2015 was presented in this communication using metrics data from Clarivate and the OJS Report Generator. Raw data were analyzed for the purpose of reporting to readers on the journal's performance using performance metrics available to the editor. Key performance metrics such as submissions, acceptance and rejection rates, and citation trends over time were reported and presented to the reader. It has been observed that ensuring balanced content and continuously working on a niche are among the priorities of the journal. It is also necessary to attract relevant and quality manuscripts among the authors to increase citations in other publications. Despite everything, the journal, which is relatively young, was able to withstand the initial test of time and improve its visibility in the scientific community.


Author(s):  
Fang Zhao

The ongoing success of e-partnership requires the constant monitoring and measuring of its progress and outcomes. Many companies rushed into e-partnerships in order to exploit complementary resources that they lacked but knew little about how to make their partnerships work and how to effectively monitor and measure its performance. Even today, many partnerships are left to drift without a system in place to assess the quality of partnerships. So, how can the productivity and health of a partnership be monitored and measured? The biggest challenge relating to performance measurement for e-partnerships is that e-partners are often independent business firms and legal entities with different stakeholders and different business objectives and goals. In the supplychain, for example, one firm can rarely control the entire supply chain’s performance. However, performance measures that can be extended across firm boundaries and processes are needed to measure inter-organizational e-partnerships. The uncertainty and intangibility of e-business and information technology add more complexity and challenges to the measurement of e-partnership performance. Looking at the current literature, it is not hard to find that the development and implementation of performance measurement systems for inter-firm collaboration is still in its infancy. Overall, traditional performance measures do not focus on key inter-firm activities to monitor extended enterprise performance. This chapter reviews and discusses various concepts, models and issues of performance measurement. On the basis of that, the chapter proposes, by taking a balanced scorecard approach, a new set of performance metrics for managers to assess the process and outcome of e-partnerships in a comprehensive manner. The chapter will also help e-partners to benchmark against best practices and determine future direction and priorities in their e-business partnerships.


Author(s):  
Johannes Schobel ◽  
Thomas Probst ◽  
Manfred Reichert ◽  
Winfried Schlee ◽  
Marc Schickler ◽  
...  

To deal with drawbacks of paper-based data collection procedures, the QuestionSys approach empowers researchers with none or little programming knowledge to flexibly configure mobile data collection applications on demand. The mobile application approach of QuestionSys mainly pursues the goal to mitigate existing drawbacks of paper-based collection procedures in mHealth scenarios. Importantly, researchers shall be enabled to gather data in an efficient way. To evaluate the applicability of QuestionSys, several studies have been carried out to measure the efforts when using the framework in practice. In this work, the results of a study that investigated psychological insights on the required mental effort to configure the mobile applications are presented. Specifically, the mental effort for creating data collection instruments is validated in a study with N = 80 participants across two sessions. Thereby, participants were categorized into novices and experts based on prior knowledge on process modeling, which is a fundamental pillar of the developed approach. Each participant modeled 10 instruments during the course of the study, while concurrently several performance measures are assessed (e.g., time needed or errors). The results of these measures are then compared to the self-reported mental effort with respect to the tasks that had to be modeled. On one hand, the obtained results reveal a strong correlation between mental effort and performance measures. On the other, the self-reported mental effort decreased significantly over the course of the study, and therefore had a positive impact on measured performance metrics. Altogether, this study indicates that novices with no prior knowledge gain enough experience over the short amount of time to successfully model data collection instruments on their own. Therefore, QuestionSys is a helpful instrument to properly deal with large-scale data collection scenarios like clinical trials.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Bentolila ◽  
Ronit Kastro Ziedenveber ◽  
Yehuda Hayuth ◽  
Theo Notteboom

Purpose Avoiding truck congestion and peaks in landside activity is one of the challenges to container terminal managers. The spreading of truck arrivals at terminals can be facilitated by widening the opening hours of terminals at the landside. Israel’s Ministry of Transport has instituted the “Good Night Program”, involving monetary incentives for importers and exporters who deliver containers to ports at night. Design/methodology/approach This paper aims to quantitatively examine the market utility resulting from shifting traffic from daytime to nighttime, and analyzes customer considerations regarding nighttime transportation. Findings The external utility found in the traffic-economics model is quite similar to the economic incentive given to customers. Therefore, a significant increase of the incentive is not feasible. Originality/value Furthermore, it seems that an incentive method by itself is not effective enough, and does not motivate customers to act and find creative solutions to the obstacles they face. To achieve a considerable change in nighttime transport to Israeli ports, more effective methods should be examined.


2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourdes Torres ◽  
Vicente Pina ◽  
Caridad Martí

This paper seeks to identify the drivers of the variations in the impact perceived by managers of the implementation of performance measures (PM) across European local governments. We argue that insights from the use of PM for managerial processes and human resources (HR) management features condition the perceived impact of PM systems. The data was collected through a questionnaire answered by local governments of 16 European countries. The results show that the higher the use of PM in performance-oriented budgeting processes, the higher the impact of PM on improvements in the quality of decision-making. Monetary incentives linked to performance better explain the actual results in PM implementation than the kind of HR system of the cities and the academic backgrounds of their senior managers.


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