Clean Evidence on Peer Pressure

By Armin Falk, Andrea Ichino. Social Science Research Network, 2003

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While confounding factors typically jeopardize the possibility to use observational data to measure peer effects, field experiments offer the possibility to obtain clean evidence. In this paper we measure the output of four randomly selected groups of individuals who were asked to fill letters in envelopes, with a remuneration completely independent of output. For two of these groups the output of peers was exogenously manipulated (low or high) by making individuals aware of the number of letters previously produced by artificial colleagues. In the third group individuals were set up to work one in front of the other, while the fourth group gave the baseline output for independent not manipulated work. Our first finding is that effort of the less productive workers reacts in a sizeable and statistically significant way to peer pressure. Second, there is strong evidence of peer effects when individuals work in pairs. Third, these peer effects work in the direction of making the least productive individuals work harder, thereby increasing overall productivity.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9a52bc4d681b6c76932b82248e1cd83273d2e30

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Citations in the corpus

Tournaments and Office Politics: Evidence from a Real Effort Experiment (2010, methodology): “In terms of the underlying effort task, our experiment is similar to Konow (2000) or Falk and Ichino (2006) in that our 160 participants were asked to spend 30 minutes stuffing envelopes.”
Redesigning Teams and Incentives in a Merger: An Experiment with Managers and Students (2004, unknown): “An Experiment with Managers and Students Claude Montmarquette, Jean-Louis Rullière, Marie Claire Villeval, Romain Zeiliger”
Conditional cooperation: Behavioral regularities from the lab and the field and their policy implications (2006, unknown): “Empirical evidence supports this prediction (Ichino and Maggi 2000; Falk and Ichino 2006).”
Why labour market experiments (2003, background): “A recent paper studies the impact of peer pressure on work behaviour in a setting that guarantees control and realism (Falk and Ichino, 2003).”
Social Norms and Economic Incentives in Firms (2012, background): “Falk and Ichino (2006) report similar evidence on the effects of peer pressure in a recent non-laboratory experiment.”
Do Professionals Choke Under Pressure? (2005, methodology): “If social interaction is taken into account in the economics literature — as is done in the peer effects literature (e.g., Falk and Ichino, 2005; Gneezy and Rustichini, 2005; Kandel and Lazear, 1992; and Spagnolo, 1999) — it is usually assumed that present others improve performance.”
Who Compares to Whom? The Anatomy of Income Comparisons in Europe (2010, background): “However, outside of the laboratory, where the reference group can be directly controlled (as in Falk and Ichino, 2006, McBride, 2007 and Clark et al., 2009b), the vast majority of empirical papers have simply imposed a certain reference group as relevant for income comparison purposes (e.g.…”
Worker Absence and Shirking: Evidence from Matched Teacher-School Data, Labour Economics Research Group (LERG) Discussion Paper Series, June 2005 (2007, result): “This is also true of their magnitude relative to those reported in more general research on group interaction e¤ects (see for instance Gaviria and Raphael (2001) and Falk and Ichino (2003)).”