The incentive effects of missions—Evidence from experiments with NGO employees and students

This paper studies the incentive effects of an organization׳s ‘mission’ on the effort provision of agents. Across treatments, I exogenously vary how much the agents׳ and their projects׳ missions match. In the first study, NGO employees are assigned the role of agents in an online, one-shot, principa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEuropean economic review Vol. 79; pp. 252 - 262
Main Author Gerhards, Leonie
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.10.2015
Elsevier Sequoia S.A
Subjects
Agency theory
Game theory
Incentives
Laboratory experiment
Mission motivation
NGOs
Nongovernmental organizations
Online experiment
Studies
Mission motivation
Incentives
C9
M5
J3
Laboratory experiment
Online experiment
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Summary:This paper studies the incentive effects of an organization׳s ‘mission’ on the effort provision of agents. Across treatments, I exogenously vary how much the agents׳ and their projects׳ missions match. In the first study, NGO employees are assigned the role of agents in an online, one-shot, principal-agent experiment. In the second study, I replicate the experimental design with a student subject pool. In both experiments the agents׳ effort choices are, for any given piece rate, increasing in their mission match. In a third study, a laboratory experiment with a finitely repeated principal-agent game with random matching, I do not find a motivational effect of missions, unlike in my first two studies.
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ISSN:0014-2921
1873-572X
DOI:10.1016/j.euroecorev.2015.07.012