The Right Person for the Right Job: Workers' Prosociality as a Screening Device

Arbeitspapier

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.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 14779

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Individual ; Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement ; Altruism; Philanthropy; Intergenerational Transfers
• Thema: dictator game ; incentives ; laboratory experiment ; principal-agent game ; real-effort task

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Bigoni, Maria ; Ploner, Matteo ; Vu, Thi-Thanh-Tam
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (wo): Bonn
• (wann): 2021

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/250440
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:46 MEZ