The Determinants of Individual Performance: Empirical Essays on the Importance of Soft Skills and Monetary Incentives

This dissertation consists of three papers. The first paper “Managing the Workload: an Ex- periment on Individual Decision Making and Performance” experimentally investigates how decision-making in workload management affects individual performance. I designed a lab- oratory experiment in order to exogenously manipulate the schedule of work faced by each subject and to identify its impact on final performance. Through the mouse click-tracking tech- nique, I also collected interesting behavioral measures on organizational skills. I found that a non-negligible share of individuals performs better under externally imposed schedules than in the unconstrained case. However, such constraints are detrimental for those good in self- organizing. The second chapter, “On the allocation of effort with multiple tasks and piecewise monotonic hazard function”, tests the optimality of a scheduling model, proposed in a differ- ent literature, for the decisional problem faced in the experiment. Under specific assumptions, I find that such model identifies what would be the optimal scheduling of the tasks in the Admis- sion Test. The third paper “The Effects of Scholarships and Tuition Fees Discounts on Students’ Performances: Which Monetary Incentives work Better?” explores how different levels of mon- etary incentives affect the achievement of students in tertiary education. I used a Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit the assignment of different monetary incentives, to study the ef- fects of such liquidity provision on performance outcomes, ceteris paribus. The results show that a monetary increase in the scholarships generates no effect on performance since the achieve- ments of the recipients are all centered near the requirements for non-returning the benefit. Secondly, students, who are actually paying some share of the total cost of college attendance, surprisingly, perform better than those whose cost is completely subsidized. A lower benefit, relatively to a higher aid, it motivates students to finish early and not to suffer the extra-cost of a delayed graduation.