Michael Vlassopoulos

Corporate Philanthropy and Productivity: Evidence from an Online Real Effort Experiment

Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and nonprofit sectors as well as in firms that engage in corporate philanthropy or other corporate social responsibility policies. This paper compares the effectiveness of a social incentive that takes the form of a donation received by a charity of the subjects choice to a financial incentive. We find that social incentives lead to a 13% rise in productivity, regardless of their form lump sum or related to performance or strength. The response is strong for subjects with low initial productivity 30%, whereas high-productivity subjects do not respond. When subjects can choose the mix of incentives, half sacrifice some of their private compensation to increase social compensation, with women more likely to do so than men. Furthermore, offering subjects some discretion in choosing their own payment schemes leads to a substantial improvement in performance. Comparing social incentives to equally costly increases in private compensation for low-productivity subjects reveals that the former are less effective in increasing productivity, but the difference is small and not statistically significant. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1985 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Social Incentives Matter: Evidence from an Online Real Effort Experiment

Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as well as in firms that engage in Corporate Social Responsibility activities. This paper compares the effectiveness of social incentives to financial incentives using an online real effort experiment. We find that social incentives lead to a 20% rise in productivity, regardless of their form (lump sum or related to performance) or strength. When subjects can choose the mix of incentives half sacrifice some of their private compensation to increase social compensation, with women more likely than men. Furthermore, social incentives do not attract less productive subjects, nor subjects that respond more to exogenously imposed social incentives. Our calculations suggest that a dollar spent on social incentives is equivalent to increasing private compensation by at least half a dollar.

‘Putting a Foot in the Door’: Volunteer Hiring and Organizational Form

Volunteering often acts as a stepping stone into a paid position. This paper provides an explanation for the fact that non-profit employers are uniquely able to attract volunteers with social concerns and career aspirations and for the related observation that non-profits figure prominently in mission-related activities. The theory is predicated on that—by committing to not distributing profits—non-profit incorporation relaxes the incentive constraint that employers face when implicitly contracting with volunteers. The not-for-profit commitment is shown to be effective only in activities where producers, who can choose to be for-profit or non-profit, care about the level of the service being provided.

Dataset for "Now that you mention it: A Survey Experiment on Information, Inattention and Online Privacy"

Dataset supporting: Rosa Marreiros, H., et al (2017). “Now that you mention it”: a survey experiment on information, inattention and online privacy. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2017.03.024