IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/lvl/lacicr/0315.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Piece Rates, Fixed Wages and Incentives: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Shearer, Bruce

Abstract

Data from a field experiment conducted within a tree-planting firm are used to estimate the gain in productivity that is realized when workers are paid piece rates rather than fixed wages. The experiment provides daily observations on individual worker productivity under both piece rates and fixed wages. ANOVA methods are used to estimate the incentive effect to be 20%. Since planting conditions potentially affect the incentive effect, structural econometric methods are used to generalize the experimental results to out-of-sample conditions. The structural model suggests that the average incentive effect outside of the experimental conditions would be at least 21.7%

Suggested Citation

  • Shearer, Bruce, 2003. "Piece Rates, Fixed Wages and Incentives: Evidence from a Field Experiment," Cahiers de recherche 0315, CIRPEE.
    • Handle: RePEc:lvl:lacicr:0315
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cirpee.org/fileadmin/documents/Cahiers_2003/CIRPEE03-15.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Compensation; Incentives; Experiments;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D2 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations
    • J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
    • L2 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior
    • C9 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:lvl:lacicr:0315. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Manuel Paradis (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cirpeca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.