There is growing interest in the use of loss contracts that offer performance incentives as upfront payments that employees can lose. Standard behavioral models predict a tradeoff in the use of loss contracts: employees will work harder under loss contracts than under gain contracts; but,...

This paper explores the meaning and implications of the desire by workers for impact. We find that this impact motive can make firms in a competitive labor market act as monopsonists, lead workers with the same characteristics but at different firms to earn different wages, may alleviate the...

This paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of worker's pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: action-oriented altruism and output-oriented altruism. To this end we employ an experimental design that first measures the...

Debates about the future of work frequently reference past instances of transformative innovation to preface analysis of how automation and artificial intelligence could reshape society and the economy. However, technological shifts in history are rarely considered in depth or used to improve...

This paper investigates whether risk aversion and impatience are correlated with cognitive ability. We conduct incentive compatible choice experiments measuring risk aversion, and impatience over an annual time horizon, for a representative sample of roughly 1,000 German adults. A measure of...

When behavioral biases have varying sizes, and the State seeks to correct behavior through compulsion, the question is how to design optimal compulsion. One argument is that the amount of compulsion should rise with the size of the bias to be "cured". A contrary argument is that since compulsion...

This paper studies how organizational design affects moral outcomes. Subjects face the decision to either kill mice for money or to save mice. We compare a Baseline treatment where subjects are fully pivotal to a Diffused-Pivotality treatment where subjects simultaneously choose in groups of...