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Incentives and gender in a multi-task setting: An experimental study with real-effort tasks

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  • Zahra Murad
  • Charitini Stavropoulou
  • Graham Cookson

Abstract

This paper investigates the behavioural effects of competitive, social-value and social-image incentives on men’s and women’s allocation of effort in a multi-task environment. Specifically, using two real-effort laboratory tasks, we investigate how competitive prizes, social-value generation and public awards affect effort allocation decisions between the tasks. We find that all three types of incentives significantly focus effort allocation towards the task they are applied in, but the effect varies significantly between men and women. The highest effort distortion lies with competitive incentives, which is due to the effort allocation decision of men. Women exert similar amount of effort across the three incentive conditions, with slightly lower effort levels in the social-image incentivized tasks. Our results inform how and why genders differences may persist in competitive workplaces.

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  • Zahra Murad & Charitini Stavropoulou & Graham Cookson, 2019. "Incentives and gender in a multi-task setting: An experimental study with real-effort tasks," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(3), pages 1-18, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0213080
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213080
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    Cited by:

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    2. Matthias Stefan & Jürgen Huber & Michael Kirchler & Matthias Sutter & Markus Walzl, 2020. "Monetary and Social Incentives in Multi-Tasking: The Ranking Substitution Effect," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2020_10, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
    3. Steven Jacob Bosworth & Simon Bartke, 2019. "Cross-task spillovers in workplace teams: Motivation vs. learning," Economics Discussion Papers em-dp2019-15, Department of Economics, University of Reading.

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    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior

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