Reporting Peers’ Wrongdoing: Evidence on the Effect of Incentives on Morally Controversial Behavior
通过阿富汗教育部员工的实地实验，发现金钱奖励举报同事缺勤可能适得其反，因为人们厌恶为伤害他人而收钱；但当举报后果不严重时，奖励不会产生反效果。
Abstract I show that offering monetary rewards to whistleblowers can backfire as a moral aversion to being paid for harming others can reverse the effect of financial incentives. I run a field experiment with employees of the Afghan Ministry of Education, who are asked to confidentially report on their colleagues’ attendance. I use a two-by-two design, randomizing whether or not reporting absence carries a monetary incentive as well as the perceived consequentiality of the reports. In the consequential treatment arm, where employees are given examples of the penalties that might be imposed on absentees, 15% of participants choose to denounce their peers when reports are not incentivized. In this consequential group, rewards backfire: Only 10% of employees report when denunciations are incentivized. In the non-consequential group, where participants are guaranteed that their reports will not be forwarded to the government, only 6% of employees denounce absence without rewards. However, when moral concerns of harming others are limited through the guarantee of non-consequentiality, rewards do not backfire: The incentivized reporting rate is 12%.