Karim Lakhani,
Assistant Professor, Technology and Operations Management
Harvard Business School
October 21, 2011
Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am
Seminar Title : “Fit”: Field Experiment Evidence on Sorting, Incentives and Creative Worker Performance
Abstract
We present the results of a 10-day field experiment in which over 500 elite software developers prepared solutions to the same computational algorithmic problem. Participants were divided into two groups with identical skills distributions and exposed to the same competitive institutional setting. The “sorted” group was composed of individuals who preferred the competitive regime instead of a team-based outside option. The “unsorted” group had population-average preferences for working in the regime or the outside option. We find this sorting on this basis of institutional preferences doubled effort and the performance of solutions—controlling for skills, monetary incentives and institutional details.
Click here for a copy of the paper.