How do Incentives affect Creativity?

Katharina Eckartz and Oliver Kirchkamp and Daniel Schunk

We compare performance in a word based creativity task under three incentive schemes: a flat fee, a linear payment and a tournament. Furthermore, we also compare performance under two control tasks (Raven's advanced progressive matrices or a number-adding task) with the same treatments. In all tasks we find that incentives seem to have very small effects and that differences in performance are predominantly related to individual skills.

JEL-Classification: C91, J33

Keywords: Creativity, Incentives, Real effort task, Experimental economics

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• The paper is available as Jena Economic Research Paper 2012-68 and as CESifo Working Paper No. 4049.

  Here is the most recent version as of January 2020.

• To create the lettersets we use the following program in C