Will There Be Blood? Incentives and Substitution Effects in Pro-social Behavior We examine how economic incentives affect pro-social behavior through the analysis of a unique dataset with information on more than 14,000 American Red Cross blood drives. Our findings are consistent with blood donors responding to incentives in a “standard” way; offering donors economic incentives significantly in...

Private land conservation (PLC) is an increasingly recognized strategy to help address the global biodiversity crisis. Understanding landowners’ context-dependent preferences for different PLC policies key designing and implementing successful voluntary strategies aiming foster participation long-term engagement. However, funding shortfalls diverse cultural values mean that traditional approach...

Conventional wisdom suggests that an increase in monetary incentives should induce agents to exert higher effort. In this paper, however, we demonstrate that this may not hold in team settings. In the context of sequential team production with positive externalities between agents, incentive reversal might occur: an increase in monetary incentives (either because rewards increase or effort cost...

In a pastoralist setting in Ethiopia, we assessed changes in attendance between the first and subsequent antenatal care (ANC) visits following the implementation of non-monetary incentives in a primary health care centre over a 3-year period from October 2009 to September 2012. Incentives included the provision of a bar of soap, a bucket, a mosquito net, sugar, cooking oil, a jerrycan and a del...

The aim of this paper is to test the effectiveness of wage-irrelevant goal setting policies in a laboratory environment. In our design, managers can assign a goal to their workers by setting a certain level of performance on the work task. We establish our theoretical conjectures by developing a model in which assigned goals act as reference points to workers’ intrinsic motivation. Consistent w...

OBJECTIVE To quantify the effect of strategies to improve retention in randomised trials. DESIGN Systematic review and meta-analysis. DATA SOURCES Sources searched: MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, DARE, CENTRAL, CINAHL, C2-SPECTR, ERIC, PreMEDLINE, Cochrane Methodology Register, Current Controlled Trials metaRegister, WHO trials platform, Society for Clinical Trials (SCT) conference proceedings ...

There is a nuanced interplay between the provision of monetary incentives and behavioral performance. Individuals' performance typically increases with increasing incentives only up to a point, after which larger incentives may result in decreases in performance, a phenomenon known as "choking." We investigated the influence of incentive framing on choking effects in humans: in one condition, p...

W hy do people work? Economic theory generally, and the principal– agent model specifically, emphasize the role of material incentives. The standard assumption is that people work hard only if they receive monetary compensation for doing so. However, a substantial body of evidence contradicts the standard economic model. Many salaried academics, for example, work diligently year after year, con...

In this contribution we examine the interrelation between the distribution of intra-firm wage increases and firm performance. Previous studies have focused on the dispersion of wage levels in order to examine for the empirical dominance of positive monetary incentive effects compared to adverse effects due to fairness considerations. We argue that the dispersion of wage increases rather than wa...