Promoting Best Practices in a Multitask Workplace
Abstract: Employers often identify best practices and encourage workers to use them. We consider how best to incentivize best practices by analyzing data from field experiments at an auto repair firm. The best practice we consider is the use of checklists by mechanics during car inspections. We find that low-powered incentives to use checklists generate much better outcomes than high- powered incentives. High-powered incentives for checklist use had the effect of crowding out time for actual repairs. We explain this result using a modified multitask principal-agent model that predicts an inverted-U relationship between incentive strength on one task and overall output. These results illustrate how moderate incentives for best practices may have large benefits even in a multitask setting, while strong incentives can be counterproductive.
Dr. Henry Schneider
Henry Schneider is a Professor of Business Economics at Smith School of Business. He specializes in applied microeconomics with a focus on industrial organization, behavioral economics, and experimental economics. Professor Schneider received a PhD in economics from Yale University and a B.S. in physics from Wesleyan University. Prior to graduate studies, he worked at NERA Economic Consulting (Oliver Wyman) and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Professor Schneider was an economics professor at the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University before joining Queen’s University. He has a cross-appointment in the Queen's Department of Public Health Sciences, and is an affiliated faculty member of the Queen's Economics Department.
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