We examine the impact of encouragement emails sent to high-performing students in a principles of microeconomics course at a large state university, aimed at motivating them to take additional economics courses and consider an economics major or minor. Using a regression discontinuity design, we...

We conduct a field and an online classroom experiment to study gender differences in self-set performance goals and their effects on performance in a real-effort task. We distinguish between public and private goals, performance being public and identifiable in both cases. Participants set...

We conduct a field and an online classroom experiment to study gender differences in self-set performance goals and their effects on performance in a real-effort task. We distinguish between public and private goals, performance being public and identifiable in both cases. Participants set...

We experimentally test how psychological motivations can impact the processing of purely objective information. We first document that, when the high-stakes College Entrance Exam is held in the month of Ramadan, Chinese Muslim students perform significantly worse. When asked about the impact of...

Das Allgemeine Verhaltensmodell von March und Simon verknüpft vier fundamentale Konstrukte der Verhaltenstheorie: das Anspruchsniveau, die Belohnungserwartung, die Zufriedenheit und die Suche nach Verhaltensweisen, die Erfolg und Zufriedenheit versprechen. Die Teilmechanismen, die in dem Modell...

Das Allgemeine Verhaltensmodell von March und Simon verknüpft vier fundamentale Konstrukte der Verhaltenstheorie: das Anspruchsniveau, die Belohnungserwartung, die Zufriedenheit und die Suche nach Verhaltensweisen, die Erfolg und Zufriedenheit versprechen. Die Teilmechanismen, die in dem Modell...

Non-pecuniary incentives motivated by insights from psychology ("nudges") have been shown to be effective tools to change behavior in a variety of fields. An often unanswered question relevant for public policy is whether these promising interventions can be scaled up. In cooperation with a...

Will college students who set goals for themselves work harder and achieve better outcomes? In theory, setting goals can help present-biased students to mitigate their self-control problem. In practice, there is little credible evidence on the causal effects of goal setting for college students....

Ambition as the desire for personal achievement is an important driver of behavior. Using laboratory experiments, we study the role of social influence on ambition in two distinct domains of achievement, namely performance goals and task complexity. In the first case, participants set themselves...

Ambition as the desire for personal achievement is an important driver of behavior. Using laboratory experiments, we study the role of social influence on ambition in two distinct domains of achievement, namely performance goals and task complexity. In the first case, participants set themselves...

We experimentally test how psychological motivations can impact the processing of purely objective information. We first document that, when the high-stakes College Entrance Exam is held in the month of Ramadan, Chinese Muslim students perform significantly worse. When asked about the impact of...

We conduct an experimental test of the long-standing conjecture that autonomy increases motivation and task performance. Subjects face a menu consisting of two projects: risky and safe. The probability that the risky project succeeds depends on the subject's effort. In one treatment, subjects...

Contents: INTRODUCTION -- 1 The promise of engagement / John P. Meyer and Benjamin Schneider -- PART I EXPANDING TRADITIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON ENGAGEMENT -- 2 Multiple targets and referents of employee engagement / Alan M. Saks -- 3 Antecedents and consequences of work engagement: a multilevel...

We study goal setting using a randomized field experiment involving 1092 first-year undergraduate students. Students have private mentor-student meetings during the year. We instructed a random subset of mentors to encourage students to set a course-specific grade goal during one of the...

This paper presents an independent large-scale experimental evaluation of two online goal-setting interventions. Both interventions are based on promising findings from the field of social psychology. Approximately 1,400 first-year undergraduate students at a large Canadian university were...

Will college students who set goals for themselves work harder and achieve better outcomes? In theory, setting goals can help present-biased students to mitigate their self-control problem. In practice, there is little credible evidence on the causal effects of goal setting for college students....

Purpose – Previous research has predominantly approached the concept of entrepreneurial opportunities from either one of two perspectives: opportunities exist as objective phenomena in the environment waiting to be discovered by alert entrepreneurs, or opportunities are subjectively perceived...

This paper presents an independent large-scale experimental evaluation of two online goal-setting interventions. Both interventions are based on promising findings from the field of social psychology. Approximately 1,400 first-year undergraduate students at a large Canadian university were...

Will college students who set goals for themselves work harder and achieve better outcomes? In theory, setting goals can help present-biased students to mitigate their self-control problem. In practice, there is little credible evidence on the causal effects of goal setting for college students....