Procedural preferences for autonomy: an experimental study with Colombian workers

We document how the procedure of allocating barely identical tasks among team members affects productivity and the willingness to pay for repeating the job alone rather than in teams. We find a complementarity relation between the assignment procedure (by-choice, imposed by a third party with a higher hierarchy, or random) and the preferences about the task to perform. For participants in the Imposed mechanism, being assigned to a preferred task increases performance, while being imposed on a non-preferred task negatively affects performance. Moreover, we find that the participants who were more interested in paying for autonomy were those randomly assigned to be autonomous (by-choice) at the beginning of the experiment. Hence, these results suggest that people care about factors beyond payoffs, such as autonomy. Among self-employed workers, the effect on the productivity of being imposed on a non-preferred task is exacerbated, and we did not find any statistical impact on the willingness to pay for playing alone.