Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/250440 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 14779
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
The impact of workers' non-pecuniary motivation on their productivity is a fundamental issue in labor economics. Previous studies indicate that prosocially motivated workers may perform better when assigned to jobs having socially desirable implications – even if effort is non contractible and they are offered a low-powered fixed-compensation scheme – as compared to a standard job with an effort-contingent payment. This suggests that profit maximizing employers should assign workers to different jobs, based on workers' prosociality. We run an experiment to explore the link between workers' prosociality and their level of effort under a prosocial and a standard job, and show that employers actually exploit the information on workers' prosociality to assign them the type of job that would be most profitable from the firm's perspective.
Subjects: 
dictator game
incentives
laboratory experiment
principal-agent game
real-effort task
JEL: 
C91
D63
D64
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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