Experimental Design
The design resembles the one described under AEARCTR-0003532. However, it is limited to the four main treatment arms, which vary by the extent of certainty about one’s own performance and the level of working time autonomy. Subjects are randomized into one of the four treatment arms, where the treatment arm characterized neither by autonomy nor performance certainty serves as the main control group. In all treatments, subjects work on a real-effort task adopted from Fliessbach et al. (2007).
During the experiment, we repeatedly sample subjects’ salivary cortisol. Furthermore, we sample salivary amylase and elicit measures of subjective stress and well-being, the appraisal of how stressful a situation is, and track our subjects’ working time choices. We also measure participants’ demographics, personality traits and preferences, such as risk attitudes, uncertainty aversion, and an their willingness to avoid workplace stress, in order to assess whether the individual stress response to working conditions is heterogeneous and whether this heterogeneity is partly determined by these measures.
References:
Fliessbach, K., Weber, B., Trautner, P., Dohmen, T., Sunde, U., Elger, C. E. and Falk, A., “Social Comparison Affects Reward-Related Brain Activity in the Human Ventral Striatum”, Science, 2007, 318(5854), pp. 1305 – 1308.
Gaab, J., Rohleder, N., Nater, U. M. and Ehlert, U., “Psychological Determinants of the Cortisol Stress Response: The Role of Anticipatory Cognitive Appraisal”, Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2005, 30(6), pp. 599 – 610.
Dohmen, Thomas, Ingrid Rohde, and Tom Stolp, “Stress and incentives," Chapter 4 of the dissertation “Sorting in the labor market: The role of risk preference and stress", Tom Stolp, Maastricht University 2017.