Using Behavioral Economic Field Experiments at a Large Motor Carrier: The Context and Design of the Truckers and Turnover Project

Abstract

The Truckers and Turnover Project is a statistical case study of a single firm and its employees which matches proprietary personnel and operational data to new data collected by the researchers to create a two-year panel study of a large subset of new hires. The project's most distinctive innovation is the data collection process which combines traditional survey instruments with behavioral economics experiments. The survey data include information on demographics, risk and loss aversion, time preference, planning, non-verbal IQ, and the MPQ personality profile. The data collected by behavioral economics experiments include risk and loss aversion, time preferences (discount rates), backward induction, patience, and the preference for cooperation in a social dilemma setting. Subjects will be followed over two years of their work lives. Among the major design goals are to discover the extent to which the survey and experimental measures are correlated, and whether and how much predictive power, with respect to key on-the-job outcome variables, is added by the behavioral measures. The panel study of new hires is being carried out against the backdrop of a second research component, the development of a more conventional in-depth statistical case study of the cooperating firm and its employees. This is a high-turnover service industry setting, and the focus is on the use of survival analysis to model the flow of new employees into and out of employment, and on the correct estimation of the tenure-productivity curve for new hires, accounting for the selection effects of the high turnover.Stephen V. IntroductionThe Truckers and Turnover Project is a statistical case study of a single large trucking firm and its driver employees. The cooperating firm operates in the largest segment of the for-hire trucking industry segment in the United States, the "full truckload", or TL segment, in which approximately 800,000 people are employed, according to the 2002 Economic Census. The TL segment has a high-turnover labor market for its main employee group, tractor-trailer drivers, and the project is designed to address a number of academic and business questions that arise in this setting.One major part of the project matches proprietary personnel and operational data to new data collected by the researchers, to create a two-year panel study of a large subset of new hires. The most distinctive innovation of this project component is the data collection process, which combines traditional survey instruments with behavioral economics experiments. The survey data include information on demographics, risk and loss aversion, time preference, planning, non-verbal IQ, and the MPQ personality profile. The data collected by behavioral economics experiments include risk and loss aversion, time preferences (discount rates), backward induction, patience, and the preference for cooperation in a social dilemma setting. Subjects will be followed over two years of their work lives. Among the major design goals are to discover the exten...

Self-selection and variations in the laboratory measurement of other-regarding preferences across subject pools: evidence from one college student and two adult samples

“…The data used in this paper were collected from 1,261 subjects who took part in the "Truckers & Turnover Project," an extensive experimental study run in two locations over two years and comprised of several decision tasks and questionnaires (Burks et al 2008). Participants in the experiment belonged to one of three different samples, which differ in whether subjects were undergraduate college students or not, and/or in the procedures used to recruit them.…”

“…Students may be more prone to comply with requests made by a relevant authority figure (the professor/experimenter). Even so there is normally still some self-selection (for example, 2% of potential subjects declined to participate in the classroom All subjects were exposed to the same experimental protocol (see Burks et al (2008) for more details). At the beginning of each session subjects were guided through a consent form that explained the conditions for participation in the study.…”

“…Table 1 presents a summary of subjects' socio-demographic characteristics disaggregated by subject pool. 7 Before each decision screen subjects were also asked to predict the behavior of the other participants in the room, and received additional earnings for correct answers, which is why the highest earnings were $16.00 (see Burks et al (2008)). 8 The Unlikely Virtues Scale developed by Patrick et al (2002), actually consists of 14 items.…”

Cognitive skills affect economic preferences, strategic behavior, and job attachment

“…8). We also examine how CS are related to two types of behavior by these subjects: laboratory choices in a strategic game, and an important on-the-job outcome.…”

Trucking 101: An Industry Primer

“…The TL labor market has been in a "high turnover equilibrium" essentially since the TL segment emerged in its modern form after the economic deregulation of 1980. 43 Short-term fluctuations in the demand for drivers compared to the demand for other occupations with similar educational requirement (for example, semiskilled construction jobs) drives differences in relative pay, and exacerbates or improves the turnover rates in TL trucking. For instance, a consulting report by Global Insight commissioned by ATA in 2005 found that during the late 1990s the strong demand for drivers increased relative pay to about 7% above that in construction.…”