Employer Expectations, Peer Effects and Productivity: Evidence from a Series of Field Experiments

TL;DR

This study uses field experiments to explore how peer evaluations influence worker productivity and punishment behaviors in a real work environment, revealing that evaluations can boost output and that punishment depends on individual productivity levels.

Contribution

It provides novel experimental evidence on peer effects and punishment mechanisms in a real work setting, highlighting the role of individual productivity and evaluation content.

Findings

Evaluations of high-output work increase subsequent productivity.

Workers punish low-effort work but not non-compliance if effort remains high.

Peer effects are persistent, with some workers exceeding output limits after evaluations.

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a series of field experiments designed to investigate how peer effects operate in a real work setting. Workers were hired from an online labor market to perform an image-labeling task and, in some cases, to evaluate the work product of other workers. These evaluations had financial consequences for both the evaluating worker and the evaluated worker. The experiments showed that on average, evaluating high-output work raised an evaluator's subsequent productivity, with larger effects for evaluators that are themselves highly productive. The content of the subject evaluations themselves suggest one mechanism for peer effects: workers readily punished other workers whose work product exhibited low output/effort. However, non-compliance with employer expectations did not, by itself, trigger punishment: workers would not punish non-complying workers so long as the evaluated worker still exhibited high effort. A worker's willingness to punish was strongly correlated with their own productivity, yet this relationship was not the result of innate differences---productivity-reducing manipulations also resulted in reduced punishment. Peer effects proved hard to stamp out: although most workers complied with clearly communicated maximum expectations for output, some workers still raised their production beyond the output ceiling after evaluating highly productive yet non-complying work products.