风险感知、认知偏差与激励合约的分选决策

Risk Perception,Cognitive Biases and Sorting Effects of Incentive Contract

基于行为经济学视角,通过现场实验观察了具有异质性偏好的代理人对不同激励合约的选择决策,旨在探讨风险感知、认知偏差与激励合约选择决策的关系。研究发现,在具有相同激励强度的两种可变激励合约下,个体生产力水平并没有显著差异,影响激励合约选择决策的重要因素是对风险的感知,激励合约用于调节不同主体间的主观感知风险配置。结果显示,感知自己是高生产力的代理人倾向于避免与搭便车者合作而带来的损失,而感知自己是低能力的代理人则倾向于选择与高能力者合作的激励合约而增加个体收益;而无论是高能力者还是低能力者,当面对环境的不确定性对收益的巨大扰动时,都不约而同的选择了团队激励合约,这种对合作的偏好会随着扰动的增大而增强。同时,实验进一步证明了,人们对搭便车风险的主观感知与真实的搭便车风险之间存在一定的认知偏差,且该对个人生产力抱持乐观态度的代理人更倾向于选择个体计件激励合约。当企业因面对绩效工具的准确性不高,或绩效结果不确定性较大而不得不采用团队计件时,可以通过调节认知偏差的方式来改变代理人的主观预期,从而强化激励合约的自选择。

Based on the perspective of behavioral economics,this paper observed the sorting effects of agents with heterogeneous preferences on different incentive contracts through field experiments,aiming to research the relationship among risk perception,cognitive deviation and the sorting of incentive contracts.The study shows that under the two variable incentive contracts with the same incentive intensity,there was no significant difference in individual productivity.The important factor influencing the selection of incentive contracts was the perception of risk,and incentive contracts were used to adjust the allocation of subjective perceived risk among different subjects.The results show that agents as highly productive tend to avoid the loss caused by free-riders,while agents as low-ability tend to choose the team piece contract to increase individual benefits.When agents were in the huge disturbance of the environment uncertainty,both the high-capability and the low-capability choose the team incentive contract,and the preference for cooperation will be enhanced with the increase of the disturbance.At the same time,the experiment further proves that there is the cognitive deviation between people's subjective perception of free-rider risk and the real free-rider risk,and agents who are optimistic about the productivity are more likely to choose piece-rate contracts.When enterprises have to adopt team piecework due to the poor accuracy of performance tools or the large uncertainty of performance results,they can change the subjective expectations of agents by adjusting the cognitive bias,so as to strengthen the self-selection of incentive contracts.