The slider task: an example of restricted inference on incentive effects

Abstract

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.

Disappointment Aversion and Social Comparisons in a Real‐effort Competition

“…It is worth noting, however, that our observed means and dynamics in effort over time are very similar to GP; if subjects have a positive marginal cost of effort and place no value on the prize they should not be positioning sliders at all. Our result of a weak or no prize effect is consistent with Araujo et al () who perform a between‐subject comparison of slider task performance varying incentives and find only weak incentive effects. There are, however, other studies that do find that slider positioning efforts respond positively and significantly to increases in financial incentives (e.g., Abeler and Jäger ; Lee ; Neckermann, Warnke, and Bradler ).…”

Social Information “Nudges”: An Experiment with Multiple Group References

“… Unlike Gill and Prowse (), Benndorf, Rau and Solch (), Araujo, Carbone and Conell‐Price (), and Georganas, Tonin and Vlassopoulos (), we do not find a time trend in the screen data, but the restart effect is consistent with a general kind of learning.…”

“… The boost from the social information nudge in this context is particularly interesting because this is a real effort task where there is evidence that material incentives have little effect on performance (see Araujo, Carbone and Conell‐Price ).…”

Dynamic incentive effects of assignment mechanisms: Experimental evidence

“…To measure participants' effort and possible effects of differential assignment mechanisms, we used three computerized real effort tasks: the slider task (Gill & Prowse, 2012), the counting zeros task (Abeler, Falk, Goette, & Huffman, 2011), and the word encryption task (Erkal, Gangadharan, & Nikiforakis, 2011). The use of different real effort tasks was intended to provide subjects with a modicum of variety to maintain motivation through the 90 min duration of the experiment, and to account for the possibility that subjects' elasticity of effort provision to monetary incentives might differ between tasks (Araujo et al, 2016). All tasks are simple to understand, do not require pre-existing knowledge and offer little gains from guessing.…”