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

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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).