The timing of payment

2024-04-02

2024-04-19

Research questions
• Research question #1: Does the timing of payment affect agents’ task performance?
o Hypotheses 1: Middle payment generates the highest performance as it invoke reciprocity from trust behaviour and prevent the decay of effort at the decaying time.
o Hypotheses 2: Begin payment generate higher payment than the end payment as it invoke the reciprocity from the trust behaviour.
o Hypotheses 3: Middle payment perform better than begin payment as it invoke the reciprocity from the trust behaviour and prevent the effort decay.

• Research question #2: What are the emotional mechanisms during this process?
o Hypotheses 1: The early payment (begin ore middle) invokes positive emotions of reciprocity.
 We look at these positive emotions: happiness, satisfaction, gratitude.
o Hypotheses 2: The middle payment invokes decreasing negative emotions that generated from the tiredness and boredom that causes the effort decay.
 We look at these positive emotions: boredom, tiredness.
o Hypotheses 3: The emotional mechanism for reciprocity are positive emotions rather than negative emotions like guilty or stressful
 We look at these negative emotions: guilty, stressful.
o Hypotheses 4: The pure emotional treatment will not perform as good as the emotion generated from the payment.
 This will be done by the between-subject analyses of the emotion treatments and the payment treatments.

• Research question #3: Reciprocity decays over time.
o Hypotheses 1: Participation of the end group for the voluntary work is higher than both begin and middle payment groups.
 This is measured by a 3 minutes voluntary work of the agent.

• Research question #4: Heterogeneous treatment effects.
o Hypotheses 1: Time preference doesn’t affect the results.
o Hypotheses 2: Social preference may exhibit heterogeneous treatment effects.
Estimation methodology
• Unit(s) of analysis
- We perform between-subjects analysis. Analysis will be at the individual level.
• Major outcome variable: agents task performance
- Overall
- Two Parts of the Formal Task Phase
- Minute-level performance overtime
• Major independent variables: treatment group
• Secondary independent variables: emotion variables
• Control variables: demographic variables, familiarity with the principal, mood and tiredness before coming to the experiment, Big 5 personality
• Heterogeneous treatment effect variables: time preference and social preference.

• Major independent variables: treatment effect
• Secondary independent variables: emotion variables
• Control variables: demographic variables, familiarity with the principal, mood and tiredness before coming to the experiment, Big 5 personality
• Heterogeneous treatment effect variables: time preference and social preference

Lab experiment. Real-effort slider task.

Not available

Randomization
1. Students who signed up for the experiment are randomly allocated to each experimental session by our research assistant.
2. Before each experimental session begins, students randomly pick a card from a deck of folded cards on which show their seat number. The participant with Seat Number 1 takes the role of the employer, while the rest of the participants take the role of employees.
3. By the end of each experimental session, the random selection of the participants to be paid and incentivized question in questionnaire part is done by the computer.

experimental sessions

Yes

11 sessions (1 pilot session and 10 experimental sessions)

26 for the pilot session, about 270 for formal experimental sessions

5 treatments, 54 participants for each treatment