Experimental Design Details
In a laboratory experiment with real effort tasks, we measure whether decisions for extra work are narrowly bracketed: whether people make decisions for extra work by thinking only about the direct disutility incurred from doing the extra work, or whether they also take into account the indirect effects of this extra work on other work they already have to complete. Specifically, subjects will be asked to complete a fixed and given amount of work and then be asked to do additional work. However, some subjects will be asked whether they want to do additional work before and other subjects will be asked to do the additional work after the baseline work. Nonetheless, in both cases the choice offered allows to choose exactly the same amount of work for exactly the same amount of money -- the choice set is fixed, including no extra requirements or benefits from working fast or slow. A person who narrowly brackets may nonetheless act differently, since they may perceive the extra tasks differently if they are framed as having to be done before or after the required work. We will consider as a control treatment the request to do additional work after the baseline work. This represents the more natural setting of working extra time. Our hypothesis is that people do narrowly bracket and that they are more willing to do extra work that they are asked to do before rather than after the baseline work. This assumes that tasks feel increasingly more tedious the longer people do them, which we will test as well. We will test this hypothesis in a separate project.
• Experiment based on the transcription task similar to the one used by Augenblick and Rabin (2015).
• Two parts: the first part will be conducted online (via Lioness Lab, Arechar et al., 2018), the second in the laboratory.
• PART 1 Subjects are invited to participate to the first part of the experiment online. Subjects read the instructions online, telling them that the experiment is made of two parts and that earnings are accumulated in both parts and are paid at the end of the experiment.
o PHASE 1: Subjects practice with the transcription task. They are rewarded a fixed amount (participation fee), for performing this task for 10 minutes.
o PHASE 2: Subjects are told that the week after they will perform this task in the lab. They will book the slot where they can participate to the experiment and told that for that session they will be asked to complete 30 of these tasks to receive XX Euros.
o PHASE 3: depending on treatment, they will be given the opportunity to do YY extra tasks either after (CONTROL) or before (TREATMENT) the 30 tasks of fixed work. Subjects will be asked to state the minimum amount of money they would be willing to do this task. For the elicitation we will use two different elicitation methods, randomized across the two treatments.
The two methods are:
- A slider to select the minimum acceptable payment in order to perform a fix amount of work for a fixed amount of money (e.g. 13 tasks for $3.10)
- A set of multiple questions eliciting the minimum acceptable piece rate payment (13 tasks at $0.25/task, $0.30/task, $0.35/task...)
• PART 2
o PHASE 1: One of the choices made during the PHASE 3 will be selected randomly and implemented.
o PHASE 2: Subjects will work and will be rewarded according to the schedule.
o PHASE 3: At the end of the working part, subjects will be asked to answer to a series of incentivized questions, replicating Rabin and Weizsäcker (2009) with low stakes.
The 2x2 between subjects treatment design (before/after and the two elicitation methods) will be followed by one within subjects treatment where both choices to work before/after will be elicited. That is, we will ask some subjects both the "before" and "after" question, but in a randomized order, so that their first choice should be the same as in the treatments where subjects only see "before" or "after" questions, but not both. The subjects who receive both allow us to potentially estimate narrow bracketing at the individual level; or to see if people are less likely to narrowly bracket if they receive the "before" question after the "after" treatment, as this may draw their attention to the identical nature of the choices.
Arechar, A.A., Gächter, S., & Molleman, L. (2018). Conducting interactive experiments online. Experimental economics, 21(1), 99-131.
Augenblick, N., & Rabin, M. (2015). An experiment on time preference and misprediction in unpleasant tasks. The Review of Economic Studies.
Rabin, M., & Weizsäcker, G. (2009). Narrow bracketing and dominated choices. American Economic Review, 99(4), 1508-43.