Business practices and performance vary widely across businesses within the same sector. A key outstanding question is why profitable practices do not readily diffuse. We conduct a field experiment among urban retailers in Indonesia to study whether alleviating informational and behavioral...

To boost employees' performance, firms often offer monetary bonuses when production goals are reached. However, the available evidence indicates that the particular level at which a goal is set is critical to the effectiveness of this practice. Goals must be challenging yet achievable. Computing...

We study whether poverty can induce affective states that decrease productivity. In a controlled laboratory setting, we find that subjects randomly assigned to a treatment, in which they view a video featuring individuals that live in extreme poverty, exhibit lower subsequent productivity...

This article is the first attempt to study the empirical link between income aspirations and cooperation in a one shot public good game. By combining experimental with survey data, we find evidence that the more frustrated people are with their income, the lower is their propensity to cooperate...

To incentivize workers and boost performance, firms often offer monetary bonuses for the achievement of production goals. Such bonuses appeal to two types of motivations of the worker. On the one hand, the existence of a goal, on its own, triggers an intrinsic motivation associated with the...