Title:Team Incentives, Productivity and Choices: A Real-time Real Effort Experiment  

Speaker: Maoliang Ye  

Abstract: Using a real-time real effort experiment, we study how group threshold and within-group distribution methods (Equal sharing, Proportional distribution, and Winner-takes-all) affect team productivity. A group threshold is a mechanism where the team members only receive their payoff when their group has reached a certain target. We find that enacting this threshold would promote effort from those who aim to take more than half of the group target, particularly among the low skills, whereas it has detrimental effect on the low skill who only aim for less than half of the group target. In total the group threshold has no overall effect on promoting the total effort. We also find Equal sharing significantly outperforms Winner-takes-all because it boosts productivity of low-skill workers but does not harm that of high-skill workers.    

Maoliang Ye：Maoliang Ye is an associate professor at the School of Economics and Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics of Xiamen University. He got his Ph.D. degree in Public Policy from Kennedy School of Government and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University in 2012, and worked at Renmin University of China from 2012 to 2015. His research interests fall into the fields of behavioral & experimental economics, public economics, labor economics, development economics, and political economy.    

Date: November 2, Friday, 2018  

Time: 10:30-11:45 AM  

Location: Room 608, Academic Hall, CUFE