Real-effort experiments are frequently used when examining a response to incentives. For a real-effort task to be well suited for such an exercise its measurable output must be sufficiently elastic over the incentives considered. The popular slider task in Gill and Prowse (Am Econ Rev 102(1):469-503, 2012) has been characterized as satisfying this requirement, and the task is increasingly used to investigate the response to incentives. However, a between-subject examination of the slider task's response to incentives has not been conducted. We provide such an examination with three different piece-rate incentives: half a cent, two cents, and eight cents per slider completed. We find only a small increase in performance: despite a 1500 % increase in the incentives, output only increases by 5 %. With such an inelastic response we caution that for typical experimental sample sizes and incentives the slider task is unlikely to demonstrate a meaningful and statistically significant performance response. Keywords Real-effort Á Slider task Á Incentives JEL Classification C90 Á D01 Á J30 This paper was written as a joint classroom project among faculty and students for a graduate course in experimental economics at the University of Pittsburgh.

CASE: Brady is a 5-year-old boy who was seen in a multidisciplinary clinic for evaluation of deaf and hard of hearing children. Brady was born full-term after an uncomplicated pregnancy. He was referred for audiological evaluation after his newborn hearing screen and was diagnosed with a severe-to-profound bilateral sensorineural hearing difference at age 6 months. He has no other medical history.Brady was referred for developmental evaluation after completing his medical workup and cochlear implantation at an outside institution. No etiologic cause of his hearing difference was identified, and his diagnosis was presumed to be genetic and nonsyndromic. He had previously undergone right cochlear implantation at age 14 months and left cochlear implantation at age 23 months. Brady received speech and language therapy, with an emphasis on spoken language through early intervention, and met all motor and social milestones at appropriate times. Despite therapy, he continued to show delays in meeting language and communication milestones. Given concerns over persistent language delays after cochlear implantation, he underwent an interdisciplinary speech, language, and psychological evaluation at 3 years 4 months old. At the time of his evaluation, he was noted to have robust social skills but significantly delayed expressive and receptive language skills with language use limited to single words.After the initial evaluation, he was enrolled at a school for the deaf with instruction provided in both spoken English and American Sign Language. In follow-up evaluation at age 4 years 8 months, Brady was described as happy, cooperative, and eager to connect socially. It was noted that he had age-appropriate visual spatial cognitive and motor skills and had made some gains compared with prior assessments in both spoken and sign language. Notably, however, his language abilities and most areas of adaptive living skills remained below what would be expected by his developmental age and in some domains plateaued compared with prior assessments. He was able to produce some words and signs and responded to all prompts using only single words or signs and gestures. Brady's parents present today to your multidisciplinary clinic asking to understand why his language has not progressed further and to learn how they can help him reach his full potential.

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