Motivating Public Sector Employees: Public Good Contributions in Addis Ababa Water and Sewerage Authority

Abstract

We present a lab-in-the-field experiment with employees of the Addis Ababa Water and Sanitation Authority to understand how to improve co-ordination and collaboration in their daily work. Participants play a series of public good games under different rules: a standard game, a game with a threshold, and a game with a randomly selected anonymous monitor with the power to punish. We show that a common goal, in the form of a thresh-old to be attained for the group’s success, is significantly more effective than a potentially punishing monitor for increasing individual effort and, ultimately, group outcomes (conditional on the threshold being attained).

JEL codes

Replaced by

George Joseph, Josepa Miquel-Florensa, Yi Rong Hoo, Sanjay Pahuja, and Tewodros Tebekew, “Motivating Public Sector Employees: Public Good Contributions in Addis Ababa Water and Sewerage Authority”, Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 73, n. 3, April 2025, forthcoming.

Reference

George Joseph, Josepa Miquel-Florensa, Yi Rong Hoo, Sanjay Pahuja, and Tewodros Tebekew, “Motivating Public Sector Employees: Public Good Contributions in Addis Ababa Water and Sewerage Authority”, TSE Working Paper, n. 22-1336, May 2022, revised June 2024.