Incentivizing interdependent tasks: Evidence from a real-effort experiment
通过真实努力实验，比较团队激励与个人激励对复杂相互依赖任务生产率的影响，发现团队激励更有效，且绩效不随奖励金额单调递增。
Workers are often required to jointly work on interdependent tasks that are cognitively complex. Yet, relatively little empirical evidence exists on how to effectively incentivize the workforce in such settings. Using a novel real-effort experiment, we assess the effects of team-based incentives (TBI) and individual-based incentives (IBI) on productivity. We provide evidence that TBI yield higher productivity than IBI, both when holding the incentives for the worker constant, and when holding the marginal cost of output for the firm constant. Various measures point towards workers engaging in lower quality work under IBI. We also provide new evidence that performance does not necessarily increase with the size of the monetary rewards. Overall, these results underscore the benefits of incentivizing the workforce in teams in settings in which workers’ payoff are interdependent and tasks are complex.