What Motivates Effort? Evidence and Expert Forecasts
通过18组大规模真实努力实验，比较金钱与非金钱激励的效果，并与208位专家预测及文献元分析对比，发现金钱激励基本有效，心理激励有效但较弱，专家预测部分准确但高估了挤出效应和概率加权。
How much do different monetary and non-monetary motivators induce costly effort? Does the effectiveness line up with the expectations of researchers and with results in the literature? We conduct a large-scale real-effort experiment with eighteen treatment arms. We examine the effect of (1) standard incentives; (2) behavioural factors like social preferences and reference dependence; and (3) non-monetary inducements from psychology. We find that (1) monetary incentives work largely as expected, including a very low piece rate treatment which does not crowd out effort; (2) the evidence is partly consistent with standard behavioural models, including warm glow, though we do not find evidence of probability weighting; (3) the psychological motivators are effective, but less so than incentives. We then compare the results to forecasts by 208 academic experts. On average, the experts anticipate several key features, like the effectiveness of psychological motivators. A sizeable share of experts, however, expects crowd-out, probability weighting, and pure altruism, counterfactually. As a further comparison, we present a meta-analysis of similar treatments in the literature. Overall, predictions based on the literature are correlated with, but underperform, the expert forecasts.