Field Experiments with Firms

By O. Bandiera, I. Barankay, Imran Rasul. Social Science Research Network, 2011

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss how the use of field experiments sheds light on long standing research questions relating to firm behavior. We present insights from two classes of experiments: within and across firms, and draw common lessons from both sets. Field experiments within firms generally aim to shed light on the nature of agency problems. Along these lines, we discuss how field experiments have provided new insights on shirking behavior, and the provision of monetary and non-monetary incentives. Field experiments across firms generally aim to uncover firms' binding constraints by exogenously varying the availability of key inputs such as labor, physical capital, and managerial capital. We conclude by discussing some of the practical issues researchers face when designing experiments and by highlighting areas for further research.

Subfields: Accounting, Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3312a25fed10df68270829517709ba08c5af81fa

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. John Van Reenen
2. Nicholas Bloom
3. Raffaella Sadun
4. I. Barankay
5. O. Bandiera
6. G. Bryan
7. A. M. Mobarak
8. Nava Ashraf

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. I. Barankay
2. Nava Ashraf
3. Nicholas Bloom
4. O. Bandiera
5. A. M. Mobarak
6. John Van Reenen

In Safety Research

1. A. M. Mobarak
2. Nava Ashraf
3. O. Bandiera
4. I. Barankay
5. G. Bryan
6. John Van Reenen
7. Nicholas Bloom
8. Raffaella Sadun

Citations in the corpus

• Underinvestment in a Profitable Technology: The Case of Seasonal Migration in Bangladesh (2014, background): “42 Several other papers document very high rates of return to small capital investments in developing countries (Udry and Anagol 2006; de Mel et al. 2008; Bandiera et al. 2011; Duflo et al. 2011; Fafchamps et al. 2011), and this literature must also confront the same question of why households do no”
• Team Incentives and Performance: Evidence from a Retail Chain (2015, unknown): “…teamwork fixed, and only change the compensation scheme.10 On a more general level, another contribution is to provide an insider perspective on the adoption of management practices (Ichniowski et al., 1997; Bandiera et al., 2011), complementing the literature on management practices across firms.”
• The Productivity of Working Hours (2015, unknown): “4 See Harrison and List (2004) and Bandiera, Barankay, and Rasul (2011).”
• Rank Incentives: Evidence from a Randomized Workplace Experiment (2012, methodology): “The natural field experiment (Harrison and List, Rasul and List, 2011, Levitt and List, 2009, Bandiera et al, 2011a) was designed and implemented in collaboration with the company’s incentive scheme management team.”
• No Margin, no Mission? A Field Experiment on Incentives for public service delivery (2014, background): “Empirical contributions, however, mainly focus on the effect of financial rewards in settings in which employee effort only benefits the employer (Bandiera et al. 2011; Oyer and Schaefer 2011).”
• Does product market competition lead firms to decentralize (2010, background): “A number of papers such as Philippe Aghion and Jean Tirole (1997), George Baker, Robert Gibbons, and Kevin Murphy (1999), Canice Prendergast (2002), and Oliver Hart and John Moore (2004), consider the delegation decision in the context of an information-based approach. For example, Acemoglu et al. (”