No margin, no mission? A field experiment on incentives for public service delivery

Ashraf, Nava; Bandiera, Oriana; Jack, B. Kelsey

doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2014.06.014

Cited by 419 publications

(306 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Both Weber (1922) and Durkheim (1956) saw commitment to public service as the sine qua non of e¤ectively functioning bureaucracies which deliver services to their citizens. The idea of mission motivation in public bureaucracies is also emphasized in 7 See LeGrand (2003) for a discussion of these issues. Wilson (1989) and Tirole (1994).…”

Section: Motivation and Public Service Provisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This led to a range of policy experiments many of which have proven controversial in part because they were viewed as an a¤ront to the traditional ethos of the public sector where it is assumed that frontline workers are pro-socially motivated. 7 Finan et al (2017) provides an excellent review of the state of knowledge in this area, particularly the set of papers based on evidence from …eld experiments on the use of incentives in the provision of public services, mostly looking at evidence from developing countries. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Prosocial Motivation and Incentives

Besley

Ghatak

2018

Annu. Rev. Econ.

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This paper explores the role of incentives in providing goods and services that have signi…cant social returns not captured in private returns which tend to be in environments where outcomes and performances are not easy to measure, and pro-social motivation plays an important role. We discuss how the presence of pro-motivation among agents involved in the provision of these goods and services changes the design of incentives. The paper also emphasises how heterogeneous pro-social motivation puts a premium on selection of agents in this context. We also discuss alternative theories of pro-social motivation.

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Section: Motivation and Public Service Provisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosocial Motivation and Incentives

Besley

Ghatak

2018

Annu. Rev. Econ.

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“…This may suggest that either health workers get socialized into motivation or that they self-select at an earlier stage and choose a school that matches their beliefs and motivations. Ongoing work for Zambia using a rigorous impact evaluation confirms a role of intrinsic motivation (Ashraf, Bandiera, and Jack 2012).…”

Section: Health Worker Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…35 Two valuable exceptions are the Rwanda study on pay for performance ) and the Zambia study on motivation (Ashraf, Bandiera, and Jack 2012). To contrast the strengths and weaknesses of descriptive and causal analysis, it is useful to compare observational to experimental data.…”

Section: Ways Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing the Determinants of Health Worker Performance

Leonard¹,

Mæstad²

2016

Health Labor Market Analyses in Low- And Middle-Income Countries: An Evidence-Based Approach

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“…An implication of the signaling theory is that endogenously adopted regulations should have stronger negative effects than exogenously imposed ones. However, [23] finds similar effects of exogenous and endogenous fines.Our design implements regulation as minimum contribution rules, similar in spirit to [34], exogenously imposed by the experimenter.Only a relatively small number of studies compare different policy tools, focusing instead on the effect of behavioral and traditional versions of the same intervention, or of combining different tools.An example of the former set of studies is [7], which examines the relative effect of monetary and symbolic rewards on social workers' motivation. 5 different policy treatments in inducing spillovers.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Not so Gentle Push: Behavioral Spillovers and Policy Instruments

d’Adda

Capraro²,

Tavoni

2016

SSRN Journal

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We examine whether spillovers of pro-social behavior depend on how behavioral changes are induced. We conduct a large experiment using economic games, with a Dictator Game (DG) followed by either an identical game or a Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). We influence initial behavior through widely used policy instruments, either behaviorally informed (default, social norms) or with an economic/regulatory rationale (incentives, regulation). Our results provide evidence of positive spillovers to subsequent economic games (which are not treated), but only for the traditional economic/regulatory interventions and within the same game type. Specifically, inducing higher giving in the first stage leads to subsequent higher altruism in the DG, but not to more cooperation in the PD. The carry over of pro-social behavior appears to be driven by an anchoring on the initial donation. We also measure observers' beliefs and we find that these results MotivationEvaluation of policy interventions is widely recognized as a valuable tool to inform policy design ([87];[1]). Generally, rigorous evidence, on which the relevance, efficiency and effectiveness of policies is based, does not extend beyond the specific scope of the intervention under study. However, the extent to which the effects of public policy interventions spill across contexts can greatly influence their evaluation.Pro-social behavior is one realm where the presence of spillovers is likely to be particularly relevant. Individuals interact strategically in many different settings and the same normative value can influence behavior in different contexts and groups. For instance, evidence from economic experiments shows that previously established cooperative precedents lead to higher cooperation in subsequent games ([60]; [30]; [17]). The presence of spillovers of pro-social behavior has large policy implications as well:for instance, a key policy question in the environmental economics literature is whether interventions that foster cooperative norms in the conservation of a specific environmental resource have positive or negative spillovers to other pro-environmental behaviors ([32, 90]).The sign and magnitude of policy spillovers may depend on the instrument used to induce behavioral changes. In recent years, innovative policy interventions based on the insights of social psychology and behavioral economics have attracted increasing interest by legislators. These policy interventions complement traditional ones based on economic incentives or regulation, and have now seen application in many fields, including to a large extent pro-social and environmental behavior ([2]; [18,86]).However, while comparisons of traditional and behavioral policy instruments exist in the literature ([53]; [36]), little is known about how treatment effects would carry forward outside the specific area they were designed for [32]. Moreover, most existing studies compare only few policy instruments within the same design, and, to our knowledge, no assessment of the relative effectiven...

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No margin, no mission? A field experiment on incentives for public service delivery

Cited by 419 publications

References 42 publications

Prosocial Motivation and Incentives

Prosocial Motivation and Incentives

Analyzing the Determinants of Health Worker Performance

The Not so Gentle Push: Behavioral Spillovers and Policy Instruments

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