High-Powered Performance Pay and Crowding Out of Nonmonetary Motives
通过受试者内实验设计，发现高强度绩效激励也会挤出工人的非货币工作动机，但存在个体异质性，少数工人反而出现动机挤入。
A previous literature cautions that paying workers for performance might crowd out nonmonetary motives to work hard. Empirical evidence from the field, however, has been based on between-subjects designs that are best suited for detecting crowding out due to low-powered incentives. High-powered incentives in the workplace tend to increase output, but it is unknown whether this masks crowding out. This paper uses a within-subject experimental design and finds evidence that crowding out also extends to high-powered incentives in a real work setting with paid workers. There is individual heterogeneity, however, with a minority of workers reporting crowding in of motivation. Thus, the impact of performance pay might depend on the mix of worker types. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2846 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.