Internal Lunch Seminars

Neither more nor less: Responsiveness to performance feedback and subsequent performance

In spite of certain contradictory findings and missing details on the process itself, performance feedback literature can largely explain why and when the organization prefers change or rigidity. While understanding organizational behavior has enormous value, we are still unsure of its performance consequences. This research aims to contribute to answering the question of the relationship between responsiveness to performance feedback (intensity with which organization reacts to a given performance feedback message) and subsequent performance. Using data from U.S. manufacturing firms, the findings support the inverted U shape relationship between responsiveness and performance and the notion that less responsiveness is ceteris paribus preferred to equivalently more responsiveness.

Retirement Savings of the Self Employed - Experimental Desing

Finance and Behavior: Best Practices in Italy

The aim of my research is to investigate the relationship between financial literacy and behavior in the face of the growing challenge of FinTech. To do so, I personally set-up a financial education program for high-school students called “Futuro Sicuro” in order to understand if it could change financial habits among millennials. This program provides two types of randomized treatment at the class level, a theoretical rule-of-thumb based one with the presence of financial advisors, and a high digitized one based on the learn-by-playing rule through App and websites. The empirical research is carried out using personally collected data during the pilot of the program aforesaid involving 650 students.

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A field intervention experiment – behavioral intervention aiming for (avoidable) food waste reduction

Food waste is a phenomenon associated with substantial economic (inefficient use and misallocation of resources) and social consequences (environmental impacts and consumption of limited resources). Food waste is caused neither by a single factor nor a single group, and (likely) is not resulting from intentional act such as “I like to waste food”. Certain percentage of food loss and even food waste is present in all stages of food chain. Yet there are significant differences in the food waste intensity along the food chain stages – with the final stages being major sources of food waste. The key culprit seem to be households’ behavior, despite the fact food waste is commonly viewed as undesirable. The research area of the project at hand is to design and empirically test procedures that would be applicable by subjects responsible for waste management (foremost municipalities), leading to a reduction of food waste through behavioral change. A field intervention experiment, targeting local population in Brno is the main method. The population is divided into three groups: control group, antecedent-intervention experimental group and feedback-intervention experimental group, with each group being represented by 4 different locations with presumed influential population characteristics.

Specifics of labor mobility in Slovakia

In June of this year, an amendment to the Act on Employment Services came into force in Slovakia, to make the conditions for entitlement to a work-related allowance and a work mobility allowance more attractive. However, in addition to the costs of labor mobility also other determinants influence the decision-making of individuals on the allocation of time to the commuting to and from work. We quantify the average weekly time spent on commuting in the Slovak Republic at NUTS 2 level and identify the differences in the determinants affecting the labor mobility in the surveyed areas. From the source database, which is the result of a questionnaire survey conducted in April 2017, we use data on employed respondents aged 15-64 in a total of 1 537.

The support of the grant scheme VEGA 1/0621/17 “Decision-making Process of Slovak Households about Allocation of Time for Paid and Unpaid Work and Household Strategies’ Impact on Selected Areas of the Economic Practice”.

Performing and outsourcing unpaid domestic work in Slovakia

In Slovakia people traditionally devote lots of time to perform a variety of work in their households. However, a lot of goods and services, which households produce themselves, are offered by the market as well, so households can buy them, instead of doing them by themselves. On the basis of data obtained by a primary research done in Faculty of Economics Matej Bel University on the sample of 1,142 households, the types of housework which are mostly outsourced by Slovak household are identified. The main factors households perceive as important for making decisions about outsourcing housework and barriers to outsourcing them are also examined.

The support of the grant scheme VEGA 1/0621/17 “Decision-making Process of Slovak Households about Allocation of Time for Paid and Unpaid Work and Household Strategies’ Impact on Selected Areas of the Economic Practice”.

Optimal monetary policy with zero lower bound when agents are learning

Tips not kept

Waiters often pool their tips and in some restaurants, waiters do not get to keep their tips, but forfeit them to their employer. We use a variation of the dictator game to explore if and how these scenarios may affect tipping behavior if customers are aware of them. Lab experiment participants are divided into dictators and servers. Servers solve an effort intensive task and earn their dictator a lower or higher amount of money based on their performance (money earned is a proxy for service quality.) In the baseline treatment, dictators then decide if they want to tip their server and how much. In the pooling treatment, dictators decide if and how much to tip their server knowing that the tips will be pooled. In the third treatment, where waiters do not get to keep their tips, dictators choose if and how “big” and expensive a Thank you message to send to their server, knowing he will not receive any of the money it cost.

The effects of corporate social responsibility on labor supply: Evidence from a field experiment with gig-workers

Tommaso Reggiani (Masaryk University) & Rainer Michael Rilke (WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management

We investigate the influence of pro-social incentives on workers' labor supply in a natural field experiment. We recruited workers to take part in a survey for a fixed compensation. Having finished the survey, a bonus payment is offered in order to perform an additional optional task. In different treatments, the bonus payment generates (i) a standard private gain, (ii) an equivalent donation or (iii) different combinations of private gain and donation. We observe that high donations in combination with no or only small individual gains lead to negative or null effects on labor supply. Bonus combinations of small donations and generous private gains increase labor supply. Effort provision, as well as job satisfaction, are not systematically affected by the different incentive schemes. The experiment sheds lights on widely accepted claims that corporate philanthropy measures are effective tools to motivate employees. When firms consider the design of pro-social incentives schemes, they should be vigilant about employees' distributional concerns.

Does homeownership hinder labor market activity? Evidence from housing privatization in Brno

(joint work with Josef Montag)

This paper uses housing privatization in Brno as a quasi-experiment producing exogenous assignment of homeownership status. We do not find homeownership to be causing higher unemployment. In fact, our estimates are consistently negative and economically substantively, ranging from -3 to -8 percentage points. We find no evidence that homeownership lowers labor force participation.