Incentives, frames and language: Motivation crowding out in a bribery experiment

• Main Authors: Aquino, Ana Kristina D., Cuaderno, Monica Alicia P., Relucio, Caryl Bevvy C.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2007
• Subjects: Bribery; Incentive (Psychology); Incentives in industry
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_honors/266
• Institution: De La Salle University

Explicit incentives are assumed to improve performance, but the motivation crowding out theory suggests otherwise. Social and moral considerations of exerting better efforts are weakened by introducing bribes in exchange. This alternative theory is consistent with the discontinuity hypothesis, signifying that individuals may perform better even without incentives, but behave differently when offered low amounts and will eventually improve when offered with sufficient amounts. To verify this, we experimentally investigated the effect of presenting bribes designed to test these contrasting claims. By way of proposing various amounts of incentives in different context that is, economic, social and moral, we were able to elicit different effort levels. This is accomplished via experimental instructions. The results however, did not strongly support the hypothesis of crowding out economic agents' intrinsic interest. Higher levels of acceptance and efforts exhibited the same increasing trend when given higher bribes for all contexts. This supports the idea that analytically equivalent incentives shall have the same effect on the manner by which subjects respond to offers. It is also interesting to note that switching frames through language resulted to learning across repeated rounds. Several possible interpretations merit further discussion.