Gift exchange and reciprocity in competitive experimental markets

Fehr, Ernst; Kirchsteiger, Georg; Riedl, Arno

doi:10.1016/s0014-2921(96)00051-7

Cited by 342 publications

(175 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…The chief advantage of the self-chosen goal contract is that it can exploit the private information that the employee has about his/her own ability, and potentially align the incentives of employer and employee. On the other hand, an exogenous goal set by an employer might be able to benefit from an additional motivating force for the worker, the desire to reciprocate a generous wage offer chosen by an employer (Fehr et al, 1998). This is an issue to be explored in future research.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Paying with Self-Chosen Goals: Incentives and Gender Differences

2015

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To boost employees' performance, firms often offer monetary bonuses when production goals are reached. However, the evidence suggests that the particular level of a goal is critical to the effectiveness of this practice. Goals must be challenging yet achievable. Computing optimal goals when employees have private information about their own abilities is often not feasible for the firm. To solve this problem, we propose a compensation scheme in which workers set their own production goals. We provide a simple model of self-chosen goals and test its predictions in the laboratory. The evidence we find in the laboratory confirms our model's predictions for men, but not for women. Men exert greater effort under the self-chosen goal contract system than under a piece rate contract. In contrast, women perform worse under the self-chosen goal contract. Further analysis suggests that this is because women fail to set goals that are challenging enough, because they are less likely to update their goals to take into account their improving performance as they repeat the task. JEL: C91, C92, J16, J24.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is a large literature on performance-payment schemes (e.g. Lazear (1986), Lazear (2000)) and bonus contracts, (Fehr et al, 1998(Fehr et al, , 2007, but the type of bonuses that this literature studies are exclusively those exogenously set by the firm.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paying with Self-Chosen Goals: Incentives and Gender Differences

2015

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“…(Ren et al 2007) We also explored motivational approaches aiming to appeal to the users' intrinsic motivations. One of these approaches (Sahib and Vassileva 2009) was inspired by the Common Identity Theory, and the other two approaches (Webster and Vassileva 2006;Raghavun and Vassileva 2011) were inspired by the Common-Bond Theory and the Theory of Reciprocation (Fehr et al 1998). While the evaluation results of our approaches based on the Common Identity and Common-Bond Theory were inconclusive, the reciprocation-inspired mechanism (Webster and Vassileva 2006) was successful in engaging users to develop reciprocal relationships among each other.…”

Section: "Gentle" Approaches Appealing To Intrinsic Motivation and Rementioning

confidence: 96%

“…Many findings of Behavioral Economics relate to why people make certain choices and what drives or motivates people's behaviors, showing that many theoretically sound economic mechanisms are not psychologically valid and fail when tried with real users (Ariely 2008). Ernst Fehr and his colleagues (Fehr et al 1998), and others (e.g. Armin Falk, Matthew Rabin) studied psychological phenomena, such as "fairness", "inequity aversion", and "reciprocal altruism", which put in question the classical economics assumption of "perfect selfishness."…”

Section: Behavioral Economics View Of Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While the evaluation results of our approaches based on the Common Identity and Common-Bond Theory were inconclusive, the reciprocation-inspired mechanism (Webster and Vassileva 2006) was successful in engaging users to develop reciprocal relationships among each other. The theory of reciprocation (Fehr et al 1998), states that people generally tend to return favors received from others. We designed a visualization that shows the relationship between the user (viewer) and the other users with respect to the two sides of the relationship: how much the other user tends to view the posts of the viewer and how much the viewer tends to view the posts of the other user.…”

Section: "Gentle" Approaches Appealing To Intrinsic Motivation and Rementioning

confidence: 99%

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Motivating participation in social computing applications: a user modeling perspective

Vassileva

2012

User Model User-Adap Inter

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The explosive growth of Web-based social applications over the last 10 years has led people to engage in online communities for various purposes: to work, learn, play, share time and mementos with friends and family and engage in public action. Social Computing Applications (SCA) allow users to discuss various topics in online forums, share their thoughts in blogs, share photos, videos, bookmarks, and connect with friends through social networks. Yet, the design of successful social applications that attract and sustain active contribution by their users still remains more of an art than a science. My research over the last 10 years has been based on the hypothesis that it is possible to incorporate mechanisms and tools in the design of the social application that can motivate users to participate, and more generally, to change their behavior in a desirable way, which is beneficial for the community. Since different people are motivated by different things, it can be expected that personalizing the incentives and the way the rewards are presented to the individual, would be beneficial. Also since communities have different needs in different phases of their existence, it is necessary to model the changing needs of communities and adapt the incentive mechanisms accordingly, to attract the kind of contributions that are beneficial. Therefore User and Group (Community) Modeling is an important area in the design of incentive mechanisms. This paper presents an overview of different approaches to motivate users to participate. These approaches are based on various theories from the area of social psychology and behavioral economics and involve rewards mechanisms, reputation, open group user modeling, and social visualization. Future trends are outlined towards convergence with the areas of persuasive systems design, adaptive/personalized systems, and intelligent social learning environments.

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