You are currently viewing the abstract.
View Full TextLog in to view the full text
AAAS login provides access to Science for AAAS members, and access to other journals in the Science family to users who have purchased individual subscriptions.
Register for free to read this article
As a service to the community, this article is available for free. Existing users log in.
More options
Download and print this article for your personal scholarly, research, and educational use.
Buy a single issue of Science for just $15 USD.
Comparing lab and field estimates
What do Swiss high-school students and Eastern European seasonal laborers have in common? When the former are tasked with stuffing questionnaires into envelopes in a classroom setting and the latter are employed to pick fruit in the United Kingdom, both work harder in the presence of their peers. Herbst and Mas reanalyzed the results of 35 such studies, either experiments carried out under controlled conditions or empirical studies based on data collected in the field (see the Perspective by Charness and Fehr). Encouragingly, they found that the magnitude of the spillover effect—how much harder a worker works when other workers are alongside—was the same.
Abstract
We compare estimates of peer effects on worker output in laboratory experiments and field studies from naturally occurring environments. The mean study-level estimate of a change in a worker’s productivity in response to an increase in a co-worker’s productivity (γ) is 
= 0.12 (SE = 0.03, nstudies = 34), with a between-study standard deviation τ = 0.16. The mean estimated 
-values are close between laboratory and field studies (
= 0.04, P = 0.55, nlab = 11, nfield = 23), as are estimates of between-study variance τ2 (
, P = 0.89). The small mean difference between laboratory and field estimates holds even after controlling for sample characteristics such as incentive schemes and work complexity (
= 0.03, P = 0.62, nsamples = 46). Laboratory experiments generalize quantitatively in that they provide an accurate description of the mean and variance of productivity spillovers.
