Overexertion of Effort under Working Time Autonomy and Feedback Provision

In the NoFeedback conditions, participants received information about their productivity only at the end of the experiment and hence re- mained uncertain about their performance at the end of the work task. [...] The number of dots visible on the screen and the deviation of the suggested number of dots from the actual number allowed us to vary the diculty level per estimation problem. [...] Recall that we designed the task such that 90 percent of subjects should have reached the per- formance target within regular working time so that we expect approximately nine of the 88 participants in the Autonomy conditions to fall short of the performance target after regular working time and to buy additional units of work. [...] If we calculated the mean of the incidence of purchases of extra working time weighted for the number of observations in each sample the weighted average would be 0.206 in the control and 0.515 in the treatment group. [...] Hence, data on the distribution of subjects’ beliefs could provide insights on the interaction of uncertainty and the intensity of the precautionary motive.