Overexertion of Effort under Working Time Autonomy and Feedback Provision

A key feature of the design is that it allows for a clean measurement of effort overprovision by keeping performance per unit of time fixed, which is achieved by calibrating subjects' productivity on a real effort task ex ante. This novel design can serve as a workhorse for various experiments as it allows for exogenous variation of perfor-mance certainty (i.e., by providing feedback), working time autonomy, productivity, effort costs, and the general incentive structure.

The project finds that subjects provide significantly more costly effort beyond a level necessary to meet their performance targets in the presence of uncertainty, i.e., the absence of feedback, which suggests that feedback shields workers from overprovision of costly effort.