Testing the Effect of Incentives on Effort Intensity Using Real-Effort Tasks

Abstract

We identify seven factors researchers should consider when designing a real-effort task to capture effort intensity (i.e., an effort-intensive task): (1) intrinsic motivation; (2) task-specific skill; (3) task strategies beyond exerting effort; (4) fine unit of performance; (5) within-round task experience across participants; (6) performance trends over time; and (7) task difficulty across rounds. With these factors in mind, we design an experiment to test for incentive effects on effort and performance using three effort-intensive tasks: the decode task, the letter search task, and the slider task. Contrary to our expectation, we find significant variation across tasks in our ability to detect incentive effects and limit the effects of the seven factors above, with the strongest evidence coming from the slider task. Our list of factors helps researchers design effort-intensive tasks that allow them to conduct a more effective test of theory. At the same time, our results highlight the difficulty in effectively designing effort-intensive tasks.

Keywords: Effort intensity, performance, real-effort tasks