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Kimberley Scharf (Department of Economics) and Michael Sanders (Bristol University)

Working for Good: Draft Trial Design Protocol for a natural field experiment testing altruistic motivation and happiness in the workplace

There is a large literature demonstrating that people behave in some sense `altruistically', donating money to charity, engag-ing in self-sacrificing acts, and engaging in costly effort to reduce imbalances in endowments. People's happiness is also in-creased by partaking in altruistic acts, and that happiness increases workplace productivity. Work from the lab suggests that people's altruistic motivation leads them to work harder when their work is linked to a donation to charity. We propose two experiments, one in a retail bank, the other in an investment bank, in which we investigate these effects in the field and, using pilot tests and simple parameterisation, attempt to disentangle pro-sociality and happiness as motivators for workplace effort in this context. In addition, we aim to test whether the level and structure of pro-social incentives are impactful on perfor-mance.