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Personality Traits and Performance Contracts: Evidence from a Field Experiment among Maternity Care Providers in India

Katherine Donato¹; Grant Miller²; Manoj Mohanan³; Yulya Truskinovsky⁴; Marcos Vera-Hernández⁵

¹ Department of Health Policy, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 (e-mail: ) · ² Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, and NBER (e-mail ) · ³ Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, Durham, NC 27705 () · ⁴ Truskinovsky: Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 (e-mail: ) · ⁵ Department of Economics, University College London, London, and IFS (e-mail: )

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.

DOI

10.1257/aer.p20171105

Volume

107 (5)

Pages

506-510

Language

en

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