TY - GEN A1 - Hoffmann, Christin A1 - Thommes, Kirsten T1 - Using loss aversion to incentivize energy efficiency in a principal–agent context—Evidence from a field experiment T2 - Economics Letters N2 - Promoting energy-efficient behavior of agents in a principal–agent context simultaneously decreases costs for firms and mitigates CO2 emissions. Along this line, we analyze the effect of incentive framing on energy-efficient driving behavior. Our results contribute to the understanding of the drawbacks of loss framing. In a situation with persistent labor market relations, an extremely low bonus, and heterogeneous prior performance, the introduction of a bonus framed as a gain outperforms that of a bonus framed as a loss. KW - Energy-efficient behavior KW - Loss aversion KW - Field experiment Y1 - 2020 UR - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176520300264 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2020.108984 VL - Volume 189 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Goldbach, Carina A1 - Hoffmann, Christin A1 - Hoppe, Julia Amelie A1 - Pitz, Thomas A1 - Thommes, Kirsten T1 - The fast and the furious—An experimental investigation of the pace of life and risky speed choice in traffic T2 - PLOS ONE N2 - Despite discernible improvements in the last decades, speeding is still a pertinent problem for road safety, fuel efficiency, and greenhouse gas mitigation. In order to understand individual speeding decisions, we need a better understanding of who speeds. In our paper, we test whether individuals' general pace of life is associated with speeding decisions. We use a novel speed-choice experiment that confronts participants with a scenario in which they repeatedly decide between driving fast or slow. This decision is associated with different accident risks. Before the experiment, each participant's pace of life was measured. Our results show that individuals with a slower pace of life are more likely to choose slow in the experiment and are also more likely to switch to slow, even when they had success by driving fast in the preliminary round. Therefore, individuals' pace of life may contribute to our understanding of speeding. Y1 - 2020 UR - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0236589 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236589 SN - 1932-6203 VL - 15 IS - 7 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Hoffmann, Christin A1 - Thommes, Kirsten T1 - Combining Egalitarian and Proportional Sharing rules in Team Tournaments to Incentivize Energy-Efficient Behavior in a Principal-Agent Context T2 - Organization & Environment N2 - Triggering the energy-efficient behavior of agents in firms simultaneously decreases costs and mitigates CO2 emissions. If firms use team tournaments to increase energy-efficient behavior and thus employee performance, they may face unintended consequences, like a bifurcation effect: Individuals drop out if they believe that they cannot win the contest. By contrast, high-performing employees may overexert themselves. Additionally, some individuals might be tempted to free-ride. In a field experiment with truck drivers, we analyze whether proportional sharing of the bonus within teams based on individual effort instead of egalitarian sharing reduces both bifurcation and free-riding during team tournaments. Our results reveal that (1) the team contest improves performance; (2) this increase in performance is overall slightly stronger under the proportional than under the egalitarian sharing rule, using ceteris paribus comparisons; and (3) the performance increase is mainly driven by the team member performing worse. Y1 - 2020 UR - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1086026620945343 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026620945343 SN - 1552-7417 VL - 35 (2022) IS - 2 SP - 307 EP - 331 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Hoffmann, Christin A1 - Thommes, Kirsten T1 - Can digital feedback increase employee performance and energy efficiency in firms? Evidence from a field experiment T2 - Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization N2 - Giving performance feedback to increase employee productivity has shown ambiguous results: Many laboratory studies have demonstrated a statistically significant effect of feedback on performance, but the effect is less evident in the field. In addition, the effects of digital feedback are not well understood. This feedback differs from other types of feedback as it is personalized, but not generated and provided by another human, e.g., the supervisor, but by a machine. We conducted a field experiment in which we introduced digital feedback to improve truck drivers' performance by enhancing their energy-efficient driving behavior. Our results show that digital feedback led to a statistically significant but small overall improvement in energy efficiency and performance that is driven by the improvement of initially very good- and very bad-performing drivers. This effect is robust, even when considering the differences in the room for improvement relative to the initial performance. Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2020.09.034 SN - 0167-2681 SN - 1879-1751 VL - 180 SP - 49 EP - 65 ER -