Personality Traits and Performance Contracts: Evidence from a Field Experiment among Maternity Care Providers in India
Katherine Donato, Grant Miller, Manoj Mohanan, Yulya Truskinovsky, Marcos Vera-Hernández
American Economic Review · 2017 · Volume 107 · Issue 5
Abstract
We study how agents respond to performance incentives according to key personality traits (conscientiousness and neuroticism) through a field experiment offering financial incentives for improving maternal and neonatal health outcomes to rural Indian doctors. More conscientious providers performed better--but improved less--under performance incentives. The effect of the performance incentives was also smaller for providers with higher levels of neuroticism. Our results contribute to a growing body of empirical research on heterogeneous responses to incentives and have implications for worker selection.
Keywords
Field Experiments, Analysis of Health Care Markets, Health and Inequality, Health: Government Policy, Regulation, Public Health, Fertility, Family Planning, Child Care, Children, Youth, Economics of Gender, Non-labor Discrimination, Economic Development: Human Resources, Human Development, Income Distribution, Migration
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