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Incentives for creativity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Sanjiv Erat  and
Uri Gneezy
Sanjiv Erat*
Affiliation:
Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego, USA
Uri Gneezy*
Affiliation:
Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego, USA CREED, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
*
[email protected]
[email protected]
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Abstract

We investigate whether piece-rate and competitive incentives affect creativity, and if so, how the incentive effect depends on the form of the incentives. We find that while both piece-rate and competitive incentives lead to greater effort relative to a base-line with no incentives, neither type of incentives improve creativity relative to the base-line. More interestingly, we find that competitive incentives are in fact counter-productive in that they reduce creativity relative to base-line condition. In line with previous literature, we find that competitive conditions affect men and women differently: whereas women perform worse under competition than the base-line condition, men do not.

Keywords

CreativityCompetitionIntrinsic motivationExtrinsic motivationChokingBehavioral economics
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 269 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-015-9440-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Supplementary material: File

Erat and Gneezy supplementary material

Erat and Gneezy supplementary material 1
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