Essays on People's Operations

I open my dissertation with a review of the literature on incentives and the effects of automation on workers. This chapter sets the background for the discussion offered in the following two chapters. In the second chapter, I will focus on the study of leisure at work as an incentive for workers. I then close my dissertation with an analysis of the eects ofautomation on the use of time at work.People's behavior depends on extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. Extrinsic motivations include financial rewards and promotions (Bandiera, Barankay, and Rasul 2007, Wowak and Hambrick 2010, Friebel et al. 2017, Lazear 2018). Intrinsic motivations include job meaning (Ariely, Kamenica, and Prelec 2008, Grant 2008, Chandler and Kapelner 2013, Cassar 2019), personal goals (Hamilton 2000, Stern 2004, Astebro et al. 2014), autonomous decision-making (Falk and Kosfeld 2006, Benz and Frey 2008, Fehr, Herz, and Wilkening 2013, Chen et al. 2019), or recognitions and awards (Kosfeld and Neckermann 2011, Ashraf, Bandiera, and Jack 2014, Chan et al. 2014, Bradler et al. 2016, Gallus 2017, Gibbs, Neckermann, and Siemroth 2017).An intrinsic motivation that has received little attention is that of simply resting: If workers value break time, they may be willing to exert additional effort in to order to complete their tasks more quickly and consume leisure at work. This dissertation explores this possibility and studies the role of leisure at work as an implicit incentive to exert effort. I provide a simple conceptual framework and an empirical examination of the effects of leisure at work on effort. My analysis confirm that the opportunity to consume leisure at work motivates people to work harder.In my conceptual framework, effort is costly but allows workers to increase their consumption of break time. As a result, a worker's optimal effort is such that the marginal utility of leisure at work equals the marginal cost of effort. This implies that situations that increase the marginal utility of leisure at work will also induce workers to exert more effort.I test the predictions of my conceptual framework using two years of worker-task level data from the distribution center the largest home improvement retailer in Chile. My unique data set contains detailed information about the worker who was assigned each task, the type of task that was assigned, the time at which each task was assigned and completed, and various other task characteristics. In my empirical analysis, I exploit the exogenous variation in the timing of FIFA Soccer Tournaments. During the broadcasting of a soccer match, workers who have completed all their tasks can attend on-site broadcasting events, which in turn increases the implicit benefits to exert effort. My results confirm the predictions of my conceptual framework and have implications for management and the understanding of productivity. My findings also offer insights into the Gig Economy and remote work, where people can manage their work time and breaks autonomously.The above analysis offers a new look at the implications of the distribution of time use at work. Inspired by this, I investigate a closely related issue: I show that automation affects workers' time use. To provide empirical evidence of this phenomenon, I examine the wholesale division of a large U.S. multinational in Chile. I find that the distribution of time use at work changed after the introduction of an e-commerce software that automated the online order fulfillment process (i.e., the software receives purchase orders and determines when and which workers should process them). Time use is affected because automation changes the relative productivity of workers across tasks. Perhaps one of the most relevant lessons is that automation reduces total effective working time (i.e., the time workers spend completing tasks). This is because increases in productivity resulting from automation are not necessarily accompanied by an increase in the demand for labor services, which may explain why technological innovations are not necessarily accompanied by increases in observed firm-level performance