Publications
Publications
- 2022
- HBS Working Paper Series
The Limits of Inconspicuous Incentives
By: Leslie K. John, Hayley Blunden, Katherine L. Milkman, Luca Foschini and Bradford Tuckfield
Abstract
Managers and policymakers regularly rely on incentives to encourage valued behaviors. While incentives are often successful, there are also notable and surprising examples of their ineffectiveness. Why? We propose a contributing factor may be that they are not sufficiently conspicuous. In a large-scale field experiment (Experiment 1) and three online experiments (Experiments 2-4), we show that even when incentives are transparently provided, failing to make them conspicuous vastly undermines their ability to shift behavior. Online experiments indicate that conspicuous incentives work by increasing people’s extrinsic motivation to earn an incentive (Experiment 2) and do not merely serve as reminders to act (Experiment 3). We also assess whether people intuit that incentive conspicuousness matters (Experiment 4); nearly half of participants reject a costless opportunity to make their own incentives conspicuous, which leads them to earn less than they otherwise would. Yet, our results also hint at some degree of sophistication: those who benefit most from making incentives conspicuous are particularly likely to choose to make their incentives conspicuous.
Keywords
Incentives; Inattentiveness; Field Experiment; Salience; Behavior; Motivation and Incentives; Management; Information
Citation
John, Leslie K., Hayley Blunden, Katherine L. Milkman, Luca Foschini, and Bradford Tuckfield. "The Limits of Inconspicuous Incentives." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 16-090, February 2016. (Revised February 2022. Revise and resubmit, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.)