To give or not to give. Explaining earnings choices in an online labour market experiment.

We invite participants on the online platform Prolific to participate in a study. In this study, participants are working on an effort task, get matched into pairs and some participant get randomly selected to split earnings within pairs.
Within the group of (randomly chosen) deciders, we randomly vary how we describe the person they are matched with. In the hierarchy treatment the decider is referred to as the boss and the other participant as the assistant. In the connected treatment, both participants are called co-workers. In the neutral treatment, the decider learns about the other participant only after completing the task and the instructions do not contain words like "match" or "pair" that could generate connectedness perceptions.
We study behaviour differences across these treatment conditions.

2021-10-12

2021-10-21

Share of bonus taken by deciders. This is a percentage of the 2£ bonus available in each pair of participants.

Participants in each of the three "decider" conditions, as well as in the "dictator game benchmark" condition choose their share of the bonus on a slider. The slider allows to choose all numbers from 0 to 100 percent in 1 percent increments.

Messages from the deciders in the boss and co-worker treatments and explanations of earnings choices for the deciders (free text).

Detailed explanation in the .pdf attached to this pre-plan.

We conduct our experiment on the online platform Prolific, where we randomize one of the participants to decide about earnings in that pair. Each pair receives a bonus and the decider can take the whole bonus for him/herself or allocate a portion or the whole bonus to the receiver. The receiver cannot review or change this decision in any way, so that strategic considerations should not play a role for the decider.

The treatment consists of three different vignettes, randomly shown to the deciders. The first vignette addresses the decider as the boss and names the other player the assistant, the second vignette refers to both players as co-workers, while the third vignette minimizes references to the other player to reduce connectedness. After receiving this information regarding their respective roles, participants work 5 minutes on a task. This task consists of counting the number of 0's. On completing the tasks, deciders learn their relative performance in the pair and make their decision about the bonus.

We conduct our experiment on the online platform Prolific, recruiting participants to a study called ``Work on a task and earn a bonus". Participants in the experiment are matched in pairs, where we randomize one of the participants to decide about earnings in that pair. Each pair receives a bonus of 2£, and the decider can take the whole bonus for him/herself or allocate a portion or the whole bonus to the receiver. The receiver cannot review or change this decision in any way, so that strategic considerations should not play a role for the decider.

We randomize participants into treatments according to the (random) order in which they enter the experiment. The treatment consists of three different vignettes, randomly shown to the deciders. The first vignette addresses the decider as the boss and names the other player the assistant, the second vignette refers to both players as co-workers, while the third vignette minimizes references to the other player to reduce connectedness.
Thus, this experiment consists of two main groups: Deciders and non-deciders. The deciders are randomly split into three treatment conditions: 1)Boss, 2)Co-worker and 3)Neutral. After receiving this information regarding their respective roles, participants work 5 minutes on a task. This task consists of counting the number of 0's. On completing the tasks, deciders learn their relative performance in the pair and make their decision about the bonus. The different stages in the experiment are explained in detail in the .pdf file attached to this preplan.

We randomize participants by their incoming player number in Prolific to the different treatments. This way, both participants entering early or late will be balanced across the different treatment conditions.

Individual participants on Prolific.

No

4214

4214 This is the maximum number of observations we can realize. This number may go down, if we have dropouts in our study. Dropouts will not get paid so that we can in principle recruit new participants to replace them. However, partners of dropped out participants will receive their participation fee (but not the bonus), so that the number of observations will decrease in dropouts, but at a rate of less than 1. Additionally, if inflow of participants to Prolific should be very slow, we may have to increase the participation fee which would also reduce the number of observations. In both cases, we will reduce observations symmetrically across treatments, so that each of our three treatment arms for the deciders are of the same size and that we maintain equal numbers of deciders and non-deciders. This is also a necessity given that people are matched in pairs and only one participant per pair can decide.

- 100 participants in the dictator game benchmark for external validity
- 2057 will be non-deciders who only serve to be decided on
- 2057 will be deciders, with 685 in each of the three decider treatments:
--> 685 bosses
--> 685 co-workers
--> 685 neutral (non-connected) deciders.