Experimental Design Details
1. Recruitment
Our project involves a lab-in-the-field experiment, using workers from local companies (e.g., hotels, restaurants, touristic
stores, farms, wineries, etc.) in Bogota and Boyaca, Colombia. We recruit workers between 18 to 60
years old from these local companies to participate in our study.
2. Real Effort Task
Our primary research focus is the workers' productivity and the change in their productivity in the real-effort task over time. The essence of our real-effort task design is similar to that of Brown et al. (2017). In our experiment, each worker works with a large bag that contains 1000 blue, 1000 red, and 1000 yellow bingo chips. They sort only the yellow bingo chips in one bowl for five minutes each round. They work on this task for four rounds. They get paid for their productivity in a randomly chosen round and earn two cents for each chip sorted in that round plus a fixed wage of $5.
3. Treatments
Our experiment consists of a between-subjects design and includes four treatments including the Baseline. In the Baseline (No CSR), workers work on the real-effort task under no CSR mission. In the treatment with CSR but no choice (No-Choice), workers are informed after the first round that a CSR is adopted for the rest of the study. Specifically, 5% of the workers' variable earnings on chip-sorting will be donated to a local charity pre-determined by the research team (i.e., the “employer”.) Workers do not make any donations out of their own earnings. In the other two treatments, we offer workers opportunities to express their opinions on the choice(s) of CSR. In the treatment with CSR by voting (Voting), individual workers are given four options--local charitable organizations that serve the purposes of environment, child poverty, elderly poverty, or stray animals, respectively-- and select the only CSR of their preference before round 2 starts. The 5% of the workers' variable earnings on chip-sorting will go to their individually selected charity. In the treatment with CSR with allocation (Allocation), individual workers are given the same set of four options and choose how to allocate the 5% donations among these four charities. The 5% of the workers' variable earnings will be allocated accordingly.
We test the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: Workers’ productivity will be higher in the treatments with CSR than in the Baseline without CSR.
Hypothesis 2: Workers’ productivity will be higher in the treatments when they have more choice(s) over CSR, compared to in the treatment with a randomly given, employer’s pre-determined CSR.
Hypothesis 3: Workers’ productivity will be similar to or higher in the Allocation treatment than in the Voting treatment.
Hypothesis 4: In response to the introduction of CSR, workers’ productivity will initially increase but reach a plateau or experience a decay over time. But the decay will kick in later when workers work for their preferred CSR than when they work for a randomly given, employer’s pre-determined CSR.