Motivated Bayesians: Feeling Moral While Acting Egoistically

Francesca  Gino; Michael I. Norton; Roberto A. Weber

Article | Journal of Economic Perspectives | Summer 2016

Motivated Bayesians: Feeling Moral While Acting Egoistically

by Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton and Roberto A. Weber

Abstract

A growing body of research yields ample evidence that individuals’ behavior often reflects an apparent concern for moral considerations. Using a broad definition of morality—to include varied non-egoistic motivations such as fairness, honesty, and efficiency as possible notions of “right” and “good”—economic research indicates that people’s behavior often reflects such motives (Fehr and Schmidt 2006; Abeler, Becker, and Falk 2014). Perhaps this should not come as a surprise to economists, given that Adam Smith prominently highlighted such motivations in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759—17 years before The Wealth of Nations.

Keywords: Behavior; Ethics;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Gino, Francesca, Michael I. Norton, and Roberto A. Weber. "Motivated Bayesians: Feeling Moral While Acting Egoistically." Journal of Economic Perspectives 30, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 189–212.

Article | Management Science | October 2020

Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance

Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino

How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can decrease their service time, up to a point, in order to complete work more quickly. As the number of tasks increases, however, workers may also manage their workload by a different process—task selection. Drawing on research on workload, individual discretion, and behavioral decision-making, we theorize and then test that under conditions of increased workload, individuals may choose to complete easier tasks in order to manage their load. We label this behavior task completion preference (TCP). Using six years of data from a hospital emergency department, we find that physicians engage in TCP, with implications for their performance. Specifically, TCP helps physicians manage variance in service times; however, while it initially appears to improve shift-level throughput volume, after adjusting for the complexity of the work completed, TCP is related to worse throughput. Moreover, we find that engaging in easier tasks, as compared to hard ones, is related to lower learning in service times. We then turn to the lab to replicate conceptually the short-term task selection effect under increased workload and show that it occurs due to both fatigue and the sense of progress individuals get from task completion. These findings provide another mechanism for the workload-speedup effect from the literature. We also discuss implications for both research and the practice of operations in building systems to help people succeed.

Keywords: healthcare; knowledge work; discretion; Workload; Employees; Health Care and Treatment; Decision Making; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Productivity;

Citation:

KC, Diwas S., Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki, and Francesca Gino. "Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance." Management Science 66, no. 10 (October 2020). View Details

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By 2013, the U.S. wireless industry was in the midst of a costly transition. As consumers began to embrace more sophisticated mobile devices, the industry's four main players spent heavily to improve their infrastructures for providing reliable high-speed data services. T-Mobile, the smallest of the four major carriers, lacked the scale of its competitors and risked falling further behind in the contest for market share. Faced with this daunting business environment, T-Mobile's new CEO declared war on the rest of the industry, decrying competitor pricing practices and upending the traditional contract-based business model. This case provides background information on the state of the wireless industry in 2013 and follows T-Mobile's early steps to transform its market position.

While global wealth has risen over the past few decades, this has not translated into a less stressful life for most people. In fact, stress has risen for people worldwide. Across six studies— including large-scale survey data from over 150 countries—we show that the typically observed negative association between stress and unhappiness depends critically on the value that people place on work. Using various measures of work values—including individual and area-level historical Protestantism, peer-group working hours, and self-reported measures—we show that the strength of the negative impact of stress on subjective well-being depends upon the extent to which individuals, societies, and cultures more broadly value productive work as a good in itself. These findings emphasize the importance of the “psychological fit” between actions and values in shaping subjective well-being. Using large-scale time-use data, we show that the moderating role of work values can be largely explained by the extent to which these values shape how enjoyable leisure activities are, rather than how they affect people’s experience of work-related activities themselves.

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Motivated Bayesians: Feeling Moral While Acting Egoistically

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