The Impact of Financial Incentives on Individual Performance: An Experimental Approach (PDF)

Diploma Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Economics - Job market economics, grade: 1,3, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: The thesis on hand is dealing with the impact of financial incentives on individual performance. For this, the perception of an experimental approach has been chosen. The target of the thesis is the development of the blueprint of an experiment to provide further research input on the effectiveness of financial incentives.

To do so, the theoretical background for studying this problem is introduced by investigating the psychological and economical approaches to analyze the topic. Additionally, empirical and experimental studies dealing with this issue are presented.

Based on those findings, the structure of an experiment to be carried out at university with students is developed and objectives, design and supplementary requirements for conducting this are discussed. Subsequent, suggestions for the analysis, reporting and possibly occurring challenges throughout the process of implementation are illustrated.

The design of the experiment is giving a verification of before detected findings of a non-linear correlation between incentives and performance. In contrary to standard economic models, the relation is not predicted to be monotonic, but S-shaped. For this perspective, not only performance on varying incentive levels is analyzed, but also performance if payments are absent. Furthermore, the influence of publishing the course of incentive levels in the beginning of the experiment, in comparison to a task-to-task announcement is investigated. An evaluation of this relation is undertaken by studying the impact of financial incentives on performance of three observation groups through two different exercises with varying incentive levels during a real-effort experiment.