The right person for the right job: workers’ prosociality as a screening device

The impact of workers' non-pecuniary motivation on their productivity is a fundamental issue in labor economics. Previous studies indicate that prosocially motivated workers may perform better when assigned to jobs having socially desirable implications - even if ef-fort is non-contractible and they are offered a low-powered fixed-compensation scheme - as compared to a standard job with an effort-contingent payment. This suggests that profit-maximizing employers should assign workers to different jobs, based on workers' prosociality. We run an experiment to explore the link between workers' prosociality and their level of effort under a prosocial and a standard job. Our experimental results provide some support to the hypothesis that selfish employers exploit the information on work-ers' prosociality to assign them the type of job that would be most profitable from the firm's perspective. However, the prosocial motivation of employers emerges as a second important determinant of their contract choice: employers' prosociality drives their con-tract choice, when the worker is not prosocial. & COPY; 2023 Published by Elsevier B.V.