Not starring Long Dong Levitt:
Via: http://platosbeard.org/archives/363
Or direct: http://www.slate.com/id/2197735/
[...]
The owner had been paying a piece rate—a rate per kilogram of fruit—
but also needed to ensure that whether pickers spent the day on a
bountiful field or a sparse one, their wages didn’t fall below the
legal hourly minimum. Farmer Smith tried to adjust the piece rate each
day so that it was always adequate but never generous: The more the
work force picked, the lower the piece rate. But his workers were
outwitting him by keeping an eye on each other, making sure nobody
picked too quickly, and thus collectively slowing down and cranking up
the piece rate.
Bandiera and her colleagues proposed a different way of adjusting the
piece rate: Managers would test-pick the field to see how difficult it
was and set the rate accordingly, thus preventing the workers from
engaging in a collective go-slow. (If the managers made a mistake in
their estimate, and the pickers didn’t earn minimum wage, Farmer Smith
would make up the shortfall with an extra payment. This rarely
happened.) The economists measured the result. By the time the
experiment was over, Farmer Smith’s initial skepticism had long
evaporated: The new pay scheme increased productivity (kilograms of
fruit per worker per hour) by about 50 percent.
The next summer, the researchers turned their attention to incentives
for low-level managers, who would also be temporary immigrant workers
but who would be responsible for on-the-spot decisions such as which
workers were assigned to which row. The researchers found that
managers tended to do their friends favors by assigning them the
easiest rows. This made life comfortable for insiders but was
unproductive since the most efficient assignment for fruit picking is
for the best workers to get the best rows. The researchers responded
by linking managers’ pay to the daily harvest. The result was that
managers started favoring the best workers rather than their own
friends, and productivity rose by another 20 percent.
Small wonder that the economists were invited back for another summer.
They proposed a “tournament” scheme in which workers were allowed to
sort themselves into teams. Initially, friends tended to group
themselves together, but as the economists began to publish league
tables and then hand out prizes to the most productive teams, that
changed. Again, workers prioritized money over social ties, abandoning
groups of friends to ally themselves with the most productive co-
workers who would accept them. In practice, that meant that the
fastest workers clustered together, and again, productivity soared—by
yet another 20 percent.
The series of experiments provided a fascinating confirmation that
financial incentives can trump social networks, with some precision
and much detail about the mechanisms involved.
[...]
============
Isn't the "experimental method" wonderful?
--ravi
--
Support something better than yourself ;-)
PeTA => http://peta.org/
Greenpeace => http://greenpeace.org/
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