An Experimental Study on the Economics of Self-Confidence, Motivation, Gender and Incentives

Objective

Inducing high effort and performance is an important goal in organizational economics as well as in education. With the recognition that imperfect self-knowledge is prevalent in such contexts, factors such as self-confidence and attitudes toward information have been increasingly incorporated into economic models of incentives in the recent years. This project proposes to study the link between self-confidence, motivation and institutions using experiments. Important self-selection decisions (e.g. type of occupation, career path) and effort decisions are fundamentally based on perceived ability. In addition, factors previously ignored in the incentive literature such as personality traits, gender, and biological factors can be instrumental in the way that individuals respond to incentives. This project proposes to conduct a set of laboratory experiments to analyze the dynamics of self-confidence and the motivation to exert effort under different institutional settings. In conjunction with the data on behavior, the study will also collect data on gender, educational background, risk-aversion, and personality traits, and will employ the recent methodology of neural measurements. Understanding the determinants of motivation, and studying its interactions with the institutional structure as well as factors such as gender are expected to generate important policy recommendations for the workplace as well as for educational settings.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

• social sciences economics and business economics

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

• Economics of Organizations
• Experimental Economics
• Gender and Economic Decision-making
• Microeconomics

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

• FP7-PEOPLE - Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

• PEOPLE-2007-4-3.IRG - Marie Curie Action: "International Reintegration Grants"

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-PEOPLE-IRG-2008
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MC-IRG - International Re-integration Grants (IRG)

Coordinator