Prior work has demonstrated that prosocial incentives - where individuals' effort benefits a charitable organization - can be more effective than standard incentives, particularly when the stakes are low. Yet, little is known about the effectiveness of prosocial incentives on people's decisions...

In this paper, we analyze the role of intuitive versus deliberative thinking in stag hunt games. To do so we, first, provide a conceptual framework predicting that, under the assumption that stag is the ruling social convention in real life interactions, players who make their choices fast and...

We study the role of heuristic versus deliberative processing in intertemporal choice. Using studies in the Democratic Republic of Congo and an online labor market, we show that waiting periods - designed to prompt deliberation by temporally separating news about choice sets from choices...

Are humans intuitively cooperative, or do we need to deliberate in order to be generous to others? The Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH) proposes that fast instinctive decision making promotes cooperation in social dilemmas. In this paper, we conduct a novel time-pressure experiment to shed...

We present the first causal evidence on the persistent impact of enduring competition on prosociality. Inspired by the literature on tournaments within firms, which shows that competitive compensation schemes reduce cooperation in the short-run, we explore if enduring exposure to a competitive...

We introduce the word illustration task (WIT), a novel experimental task to quantify performance in an idea generation context. Between treatments, we vary whether or not piece-rate (PR) incentives are implemented and the degree to which these incentives are aligned with the desirable outcome....

Peer effects arise in situations where workers observe each others' work activity. In this paper we disentangle the effect of observing a peer from that of being observed by a peer, by setting up a real effort experiment in which we manipulate the observability of performance. In particular, we...

We conduct a field experiment in a controlled work environment to investigate the effect of motivational talk and its interaction with monetary incentives. We find that motivational talk significantly improves performance only if it is accompanied by performance pay. Moreover, performance pay...

Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as well as in firms that engage in Corporate Philanthropy or other Corporate Social Responsibility policies. This paper compares the effectiveness of social incentives - that take the form...

We present results from a field experiment designed to measure the importance of managerial commitment to a contract within a firm that pays its workers piece rates. In the tree planting industry the piece rate paid to workers is determined as a function of the difficulty of the terrain to be...