Task enjoyment and opportunity costs in the lab: The effect of financial incentives on performance in real effort tasks

This study is directly motivated by the results of Eckartz et al (2012). Subjects exerted suprisingly high efforts irrespectively of how they were compensated. This paper discusses a number of potential explanations and then it will focus on two of them: first, subjects might exert effort simply because they enjoy working on the tasks. Second, subjects might exert effort because they feel obliged to do so or because they do not have opportunity costs of working. These questions are crucial to better understand the robustness of experimental results and also to be eventually able to transfer the results to the world outside the laboratory. We replicate our earlier results: in the baseline treatment we do not find effects of incentive schemes on the output. Decreasing the attractiveness of the tasks, we also do not observe differences between the incentive schemes. When we introduce, however, a paid outside option, the efforts are higher in the performance-dependent pay treatments than under flat payment. The size of the effect differs between the tasks, the direction is, however, the same.