Brice Corgnet

Reaction to Public Information in Markets: How Much Does Ambiguity Matter?

In this article, we experimentally study trader reaction to ambiguity when dividend information is revealed sequentially. Our results indicate that the role of ambiguity aversion in explaining financial anomalies is limited. Specifically, price changes are consistent with news revelation regarding the dividend, independent of subject experience and the degree of ambiguity. In addition, there is no under or overprice reactions to news. Regardless of experience, market reaction to news moves in line with fundamentals. We find no significant differences in the control versus ambiguity treatments regarding prices, price volatility and trading volume for experienced subjects.

Peer Pressure and Moral Hazard in Teams: Experimental Evidence

Holmstrom (1982) established that free riding behaviors are pervasive whenever people are paid according to aggregate measures of output such as team incentives. However, team incentives have been found to be particularly effective both in the lab and in the field. In this paper we show, in line with Holmstrom (1982), that shirking behaviors in teams are indeed pervasive. Production levels were significantly lower under team incentives than under individual incentives while the time dedicated to on-the-job leisure activities (Internet usage) was significantly larger under team incentives than under individual incentives. Subsequently, we find that a very weak form of peer monitoring (anonymous and without physical proximity, verbal threats or face to face interactions) allowed organizations using team incentives to perform as well as those using individual incentives. This provides strong evidence for the conjecture of Kandel and Lazear (1992) that peer pressure may resolve the moral hazard in teams problem.

Don't Ask Me If You Will Not Listen: The Dilemma of Consultative Participation

We study the effect of consultative participation in an experimental principal--agent game, where the principal can consult the agents preferred option regarding the cost function of the transfer to be implemented in the final stage of the game. We show that consulting the agent was beneficial to principals as long as they followed the agents choice. Ignoring the agents choice was detrimental to the principal because it engendered negative emotions and low levels of transfers. Nevertheless, the majority of principals were reluctant to change their mind and adopt the agents proposal. Our results suggest that the ability to change ones own mind is an important dimension of managerial success. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1786 . This paper was accepted by Teck-Hua Ho, behavioral economics.

Goal Setting and Monetary Incentives: When Large Stakes Are Not Enough

The aim of this paper is to test the effectiveness of wage-irrelevant goal setting policies in a laboratory environment. In our design, managers can assign a goal to their workers by setting a certain level of performance on the work task. To establish our theoretical conjectures we develop a model where assigned goals act as reference points to workers’ intrinsic motivation, creating a sense of gain when attained and a sense of loss when not attained. Consistent with our theoretical framework, we find evidence that managers set goals that are challenging but attainable for an average-ability worker. Workers respond to these goals by increasing effort, performance and by decreasing on-the-job leisure activities with respect to the no-goal setting baseline. We study the interaction between goal setting and monetary rewards by considering different values for the monetary incentives involved in completing the task. Interestingly, we find that goal setting is especially effective when monetary incentives are strong. These results suggest that goal setting may foster workers’ intrinsic motivation and increase their level of performance beyond what is achieved using solely monetary incentives.

The cognitive basis of social behavior: cognitive reflection overrides antisocial but not always prosocial motives

Even though human social behavior has received considerable scientific attention in the last decades, its cognitive underpinnings are still poorly understood. Applying a dual-process framework to the study of social preferences, we show in two studies that individuals with a more reflective/deliberative cognitive style, as measured by scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), are more likely to make choices consistent with “mild” altruism in simple non-strategic decisions. Such choices increase social welfare by increasing the other persons payoff at very low or no cost for the individual. The choices of less reflective individuals (i.e., those who rely more heavily on intuition), on the other hand, are more likely to be associated with either egalitarian or spiteful motives. We also identify a negative link between reflection and choices characterized by “strong” altruism, but this result holds only in Study 2. Moreover, we provide evidence that the relationship between social preferences and CRT scores is not driven by general intelligence. We discuss how our results can reconcile some previous conflicting findings on the cognitive basis of social behavior.

Cognitive Reflection and the Diligent Worker: An Experimental Study of Millennials

Recent studies have shown that despite crucially needing the creative talent of millennials (people born after 1980) organizations have been reluctant to hire young workers because of their supposed lack of diligence. We propose to help resolve this dilemma by studying the determinants of task performance and shirking behaviors of millennials in a laboratory work environment. We find that cognitive ability is a good predictor of task performance in line with previous literature. In contrast with previous research, personality traits do not consistently predict either task performance or shirking behaviors. Shirking behaviors, as measured by the time participants spent browsing the internet for non-work purposes (Cyberloafing), were only explained by the performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). This finding echoes recent research in cognitive psychology according to which conventional measures of cognitive ability only assess a narrow concept of rational thinking (the algorithmic mind) that fails to capture individuals’ capacity to reflect and control their impulses. Our findings suggest that hiring diligent millennials relies on the use of novel cognitive measures such as CRT in lieu of standard personality and intelligence tests.

The Role of the Decision-Making Regime on Cooperation in a Workgroup Social Dilemma: An Examination of Cyberloafing

A burgeoning problem facing organizations is the loss of workgroup productivity due to cyberloafing. The current paper examines how changes in the decision-making rights about what workgroup members can do on the job affect cyberloafing and subsequent work productivity. We compare two different types of decision-making regimes: autocratic decision-making and group voting. Using a laboratory experiment to simulate a data-entry organization, we find that, while autocratic decision-making and group voting regimes both curtail cyberloafing (by over 50%), it is only in group voting that there is a substantive improvement (of 38%) in a cyberloafer’s subsequent work performance. Unlike autocratic decision-making, group voting leads to workgroups outperforming the control condition where cyberloafing could not be stopped. Additionally, only in the group voting regime did production levels of cyberloafers and non-loafers converge over time.

Firing threats: Incentive effects and impression management ☆

We study the effect of firing threats in a virtual workplace that reproduces features of existing organizations. We show that organizations in which bosses can fire up to one third of their workforce produce twice as much as organizations for which firing is not possible. Firing threats sharply decrease on-the-job leisure. Nevertheless, organizations endowed with firing threats underperformed those using individual incentives. In the presence of firing threats, employees engage in impression management activities to be seen as hard-working individuals in line with our model. Finally, production levels dropped substantially when the threat of being fired was removed, whereas on-the-job leisure surged.

Revisiting the Tradeoff between Risk and Incentives: The Shocking Effect of Random Shocks

Despite its central role in the theory of incentives, empirical evidence of a tradeoff between risk and incentives remains scarce. We reexamine this empirical puzzle in a controlled laboratory environment so as to isolate possible confounding factors encountered in the field. In line with the principal-agent model, we find that principals increase fixed pay while lowering performance pay when the relationship between effort and output is noisier. Unexpectedly, agents produce substantially more in the noisy environment than in the baseline despite lesser pay for performance. We show that this result can be accounted for by introducing agents’ loss aversion in the principal-agent model. Our findings call for an extension of standard agency models and for a reassessment of apparently inefficient management practices.

Goal setting in the principal–agent model: Weak incentives for strong performance

We study a principal-agent framework in which principals can assign wage-irrelevant goals to agents. We find evidence that, when given the possibility to set wage-irrelevant goals, principals select incentive contracts for which pay is less responsive to agents’ performance. We show that average performance of agents is higher in the presence of goal setting than in its absence despite weaker incentives. We develop a principal-agent model with reference-dependent utility that illustrates how labor contracts combining weak monetary incentives and wage-irrelevant goals can be optimal. It follows that recognizing the pervasive use of non-monetary incentives in the workplace may help account for previous empirical findings suggesting that firms rely on unexpectedly weak monetary incentives.