Why real leisure really matters: incentive effects on real effort in the laboratory

Abstract

On-the-job leisure is a pervasive feature of the modern workplace. We studied its impact on work performance in a laboratory experiment by either allowing or restricting Internet access. We used a 2×2 experimental design in which subjects completing real-effort work tasks could earn cash according to either individual-or team-production incentive schemes. Under team pay, production levels were significantly lower when Internet browsing was available than when it was not. Under individual pay, however, no differences in production levels were observed between the treatment in which Internet was available and the treatment in which it was not. In line with standard incentive theory, individual pay outperformed team pay across all periods of the experiment when Internet browsing was available. This was not the case, however, when Internet browsing was unavailable. These results demonstrate that the integration of on-the-job leisure activities into an experimental labor design is crucial for uncovering incentive effects.

Combining “real effort” with induced effort costs: the ball-catching task

“…Recall that effort costs in economic models of labor supply denote any cost a worker might incur, physiological, psychological, or simply opportunity costs of foregone leisure. Existing real effort experiments model opportunity costs of effort by offering the subjects outside options, for example the opportunity to surf the Internet (Corgnet et al 2015), to receive paid time-out for a few seconds (Mohnen et al (2008)), to work on other productive individual tasks (van Dijk et al 2001), or to leave the task earlier than the deadline (e.g., Abeler et al (2011)). This method exploits the possibility of a trade-off between effort and off-the-job leisure and, indeed, there is experimental evidence that subjects make such a trade-off in response to different incentive schemes (see Corgnet et al 2015; Eckartz 2014; Noussair and Stoop 2015).…”

“…Existing real effort experiments model opportunity costs of effort by offering the subjects outside options, for example the opportunity to surf the Internet (Corgnet et al 2015), to receive paid time-out for a few seconds (Mohnen et al (2008)), to work on other productive individual tasks (van Dijk et al 2001), or to leave the task earlier than the deadline (e.g., Abeler et al (2011)). This method exploits the possibility of a trade-off between effort and off-the-job leisure and, indeed, there is experimental evidence that subjects make such a trade-off in response to different incentive schemes (see Corgnet et al 2015; Eckartz 2014; Noussair and Stoop 2015). However, compared to the ball-catching task which in its most minimal version may take only one minute to complete, the “outside options” method usually requires a rather long duration for it to work well (sometimes up to 60 min as in Abeler et al (2011)), thus preventing us from collecting repeated observations in the duration of a typical laboratory experiment.…”

Goal Setting in the Principal-Agent Model: Weak Incentives for Strong Performance

“…To that end, we use a virtual workplace that reproduces features of existing organizations such as real-effort tasks and on-the-job leisure (Internet browsing) (Corgnet et al 2015a). This real-effort and real-leisure work environment has been shown to be suited for the study of labor incentives in the laboratory (Corgnet et al 2015b(Corgnet et al , 2015c(Corgnet et al , 2015d. In our setting, the principal selects a wage-irrelevant goal in addition to monetary incentives which include both a fixed pay and a performance pay, where performance pay states the share of total output assigned to the agent as in standard linear incentive contracts.…”

“…The idea is to consider a laboratory environment in which on-the-job shirking is commonly observed so as to be able to uncover incentives effects (Corgnet et al 2015d). The laboratory setting allows the experimenter to control for possible confounding factors commonly 9 encountered in the field such as organizational hierarchies or implicit incentives thus facilitating the detection of incentives effects.…”

Emotions and Behavior Regulation in Decision Dilemmas

“…Perhaps as a consequence of the ubiquity of Internet access in the modern workplace, American employees are allocating about 13% of their on-the-job time to browsing the Internet (for non-work related purposes), and about an equal amount of time on other non-work related activities [123]. A similar rise in Internet use, interspersed with other work activity, is also reported for university students [124]. Corgnet and colleagues [125] studied the impact of Internet availability on a paid mental arithmetic task in the laboratory-finding that participants made regular use of the internet as a non-paid leisure activity, to break up the monotony of the effortful arithmetic task.…”