Man s search for meaning The case of Legos - people.duke.edu.pdfVIP

Journal of Economic Behavior Organization 67 (2008) 671–677 Man’s search for meaning: The case of Legos a b,∗ ˇ a Dan Ariely , Emir Kamenica , Drazen Prelec a MIT Sloan School of Management, 38 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142, United States b University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, 5807 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, United States Received 26 December 2005; received in revised form 17 January 2008; accepted 17 January 2008 Available online 24 January 2008 Abstract We investigate how perceived meaning influences labor supply. In a laboratory setting, we manipulate the perceived meaning of simple, repetitive tasks and find a strong influence on subjects’ labor supply. Despite the fact that the wage and the task are identical across the conditions in each experiment, subjects in the less meaningful conditions exhibit reservation wages that are consistently much higher than the subjects in the more meaningful conditions. The result replicates across different types of tasks. Moreover, in the more meaningful conditions, subjects’ productivity influences labor supply more strongly. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: J30; J28; M50 Keywords: Labor supply; Meaning; Intrinsic motivation; Monitoring; Experiments 1. Introduction If human nature felt no. . . satisfaction (profit apart) in constructing a factory, a railway, a mine or a farm, there might not be much investment as a result of cold calculation. . . Enterprise only pretends to itself to be mainly motivated by the statement in its own prospectus.—John Maynard Keynes Most children think o