Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/278399 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
ECONtribute Discussion Paper No. 222
Publisher: 
University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Reinhard Selten Institute (RSI), Bonn and Cologne
Abstract: 
Working time autonomy is often accompanied by output-based incentives to counterbalance the loss of monitoring that comes with granting autonomy. However, in such settings, overprovision of effort could arise if workers are uncertain whether their performance suffices to secure the output-based rewards. Perfor-mance feedback can reduce or eliminate such uncertainty. We develop an exper-iment to show that overprovision of costly effort is more likely to occur in work environments with working time autonomy in the absence of feedback. A key fea-ture of our design is that it allows for a clean measurement of effort overprovision by keeping performance per unit of time fixed, which we achieve by calibrating subjects' productivity on a real effort task ex ante. This novel design can serve as a workhorse for various experiments as it allows for exogenous variation of perfor-mance certainty (i.e., by providing feedback), working time autonomy, productivity, effort costs, and the general incentive structure. We find that subjects provide significantly more costly effort beyond a level necessary to meet their performance targets in the presence of uncertainty, i.e., the absence of feedback, which suggests that feedback shields workers from overprovision of costly effort.
Subjects: 
working time autonomy
performance uncertainty
feedback provision
incentives
effort
subjective stress
JEL: 
C91
D90
I10
J81
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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