Real-effort experiments are frequently used when examining a response to incentives. For a real-effort task to be well suited for such an exercise its measurable output must be sufficiently elastic over the incentives considered. The popular slider task in Gill and Prowse (Am Econ Rev 102(1):469-503, 2012) has been characterized as satisfying this requirement, and the task is increasingly used to investigate the response to incentives. However, a between-subject examination of the slider task's response to incentives has not been conducted. We provide such an examination with three different piece-rate incentives: half a cent, two cents, and eight cents per slider completed. We find only a small increase in performance: despite a 1500 % increase in the incentives, output only increases by 5 %. With such an inelastic response we caution that for typical experimental sample sizes and incentives the slider task is unlikely to demonstrate a meaningful and statistically significant performance response. Keywords Real-effort Á Slider task Á Incentives JEL Classification C90 Á D01 Á J30 This paper was written as a joint classroom project among faculty and students for a graduate course in experimental economics at the University of Pittsburgh.
Studies suggest that sharing thoughts and information with others may be inherently pleasurable and confer health, psychological, and social benefits to the discloser. At the same time, self-disclosure exposes individuals to scrutiny and the risk of rejection and reputational damage, particularly with the advent of digital applications and social media outlets that promote public, and often permanent, disclosing. In an effort to understand the tradeoffs that underlie the decision to disclose, we introduce a distinction between the propensity to disclose and the psychological desire to disclose and present a preliminary investigation into when and why these two constructs diverge. Findings from two exploratory studies reveal the types of information that individuals are most eager to share, as well as the contextual factors and individual characteristics that moderate the desire to share and the circumstances under which this desire is most likely to translate into actual sharing. We replicate findings from prior research that the decision to disclose is a function of content emotionality and valence, but find that the propensity to withhold negative information is most pronounced when the information is about oneself than about others, and that gender differences in disclosure are largely driven by the tendency for men to withhold negative, but not positive, information. Additionally, we capture motives and traits, many of them previously unexplored in the disclosure context, to model the underlying decision-making process that leads to information sharing and distinguish between the act of sharing information and the psychological desire that differentially engender disclosing behavior.
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