Seminar – Paying for What Kind of Performance? Performance Pay, Multitasking & Sorting in Mission Oriented Jobs

Professor Michael Vlassopoulos, University of Southampton

How does pay for performance (P4P) impact productivity, multitasking, and the composition of workers in mission-oriented jobs? These are central issues in sectors like education or healthcare. We conduct a laboratory experiment, manipulating compensation and mission, to answer these questions. We find that P4P has positive effects on productivity on the incentivised dimension of effort and negative effects on the non incentivised dimension for workers in non-mission-oriented treatments. In mission-oriented treatments, P4P generates minimal change on either dimension. Participants in the non-mission sector – but not in the mission-oriented treatments – sort on ability, with lower ability workers opting out of the P4P scheme.

Speaker bio

Michael Vlassopoulos is Professor of Economics at the University of Southampton. He is also a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany.

Michael is an applied microeconomist with wide range interests that span a number of areas: public, labour and development economics. He approaches these subjects with a behavioural theoretical framework that incorporates psychologically grounded assumptions into formal economic models of behaviour. His research approach combines theory and data, using a variety of methodological approaches, ranging from the design of experiments, both in the laboratory and in the field, to the analysis of administrative and survey data.

Recent and ongoing projects focus on workplace incentives in firms and public organisations; discrimination of minority groups; and prosocial behaviour.