Disentangling the Sources of Pro-social Behavior in the Workplace: A Field Experiment

CESifo Working Paper No. 2757

Disentangling the Sources of Pro-social Behavior
in the Workplace: A Field Experiment

Abstract

This paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources
of workers’ pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: action-oriented
altruism and output-oriented altruism. To this end we employ an experimental design that first
measures the level of effort exerted by student workers on a data entry task in an environment
that elicits purely selfish behavior and we compare it to effort exerted in an environment that
also induces action-oriented altruism. We then compare the latter to effort exerted in an
environment where both types of altruistic preferences are elicited. We find that action-
oriented altruism accounts for a significant increase in effort, while there is no additional
impact due to output-oriented altruism. We also find significant gender-related differences in
the treatment effect: women are very responsive to the treatment condition eliciting action-
oriented altruism, while men’s behavior is not affected by any of the treatments.

JEL Code: C93, D64, J16.

Keywords: pro-social behavior, field experiment, effort, charitable donations.

August 2009

We are grateful to Maryam Alriyami, Gloria Langat and Derya Tas for excellent research
assistance, and to Alain Cohn, Robert Dur, Tore Ellingsen, Simon Gachter, Ethan Kaplan,
Rob Sauer and seminar participants at the University of Southampton, CEU, IMEBE 2009,
the CMPO Workshop on Public Services and Worker Motivation and the CESifo Workshop
on Behavioral Public Economics for helpful comments and discussions. This research was
funded by the Small Grants Scheme, School of Social Sciences, University of Southampton.

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