|
Field
Experimental Design (Public)
|
Before
In my experiment, I consider a principal-agent relationship with four agents being matched to one principal. In each of two working phases the agents work for 10 minutes on a real effort task, namely decoding of sequences of numbers into words with the help of a decoding table (comp. Erkal, Gangadharan, and Nikiforakis 2011). For each working phase the agents receive a fixed wage, whereas the principal is paid a fixed amount for each correctly decoded word by her agents. Between the two working phases, agents either participate in a training phase or enjoy free time and surf the internet. In the training phase, which also lasts for 10 minutes, agents are shown a short animation with the decoding of the numbers into letters and thereafter asked to type in the solution themselves. Since every second decoding task in the second working phase consists of a task already practiced in the training phase, the training enables the trained agents to decode more words compared to their untrained counterparts. Both before and after the training phase/free time, I elicit the social norm with respect to the fair wage for the second working phase using a mechanism similar to the one introduced by Krupka and Weber (2013). In the second working phase, I vary whether or not the respective agent receives a wage increase. While both the training decision as well as the decision of the wage level for the second working phase is determined by the principal, the treatments are completely exogenous. This is because the principal has no information about the performance or any other characterics of her agents and can only choose between two (for her) arbitrary options. This ensures that my observations are independent from each other and provides me with a perfectly balanced data sample. After the experiment, the agents are paid their respective wages for both working phases, while only one working phase is randomly drawn to determine the principals’ payoff.
The experiment will be conducted at the Cologne Laboratory for Economic Research (CLER) and a total of 180 subjects (36 principals + 144 agents) in 6 experimental sessions will be recruited through the online recruitment software ORSEE (Greiner 2015). The experiment ist programmed using Java and oTree software (Chen, Schonger, and Wickens 2016).
Treatments:
No Training & No Wage Increase (n=36)
No Training & Wage Increase (n=36)
Training & No Wage Increase (n=36)
Training & Wage Increase (n=36)
|
After
In my experiment, I consider a principal-agent relationship with four agents being matched to one principal. In each of two working phases the agents work for 10 minutes on a real effort task, namely decoding of sequences of numbers into words with the help of a decoding table (comp. Erkal, Gangadharan, and Nikiforakis 2011). For each working phase the agents receive a fixed wage, whereas the principal is paid a fixed amount for each correctly decoded word by her agents. Between the two working phases, agents either participate in a training phase or enjoy free time and surf the internet. In the training phase, which also lasts for 10 minutes, agents are shown a short animation with the decoding of the numbers into letters and thereafter asked to type in the solution themselves. Since every second decoding task in the second working phase consists of a task already practiced in the training phase, the training enables the trained agents to decode more words compared to their untrained counterparts. Both before and after the training phase/free time, I elicit the social norm with respect to the fair wage for the second working phase using a mechanism similar to the one introduced by Krupka and Weber (2013). In the second working phase, I vary whether or not the respective agent receives a wage increase. While both the training decision as well as the decision of the wage level for the second working phase is determined by the principal, the treatments are completely exogenous. This is because the principal has no information about the performance or any other characterics of her agents and can only choose between two (for her) arbitrary options. This ensures that my observations are independent from each other and provides me with a perfectly balanced data sample. After the experiment, the agents are paid their respective wages for both working phases, while only one working phase is randomly drawn to determine the principals’ payoff.
The experiment will be conducted at the Cologne Laboratory for Economic Research (CLER) and a total of 480 subjects (96 principals + 384 agents) in 16 experimental sessions will be recruited through the online recruitment software ORSEE (Greiner 2015). The experiment ist programmed using Java and oTree software (Chen, Schonger, and Wickens 2016).
Treatments:
No Training & No Wage Increase (n=96)
No Training & Wage Increase (n=96)
Training & No Wage Increase (n=96)
Training & Wage Increase (n=96)
|