Give Me a Choice! A Field Experiment on Task Choice Enabled by Wearables

Considering human motivation, is it more effective to assign work tasks to shop floor workers or let them choose among a set of open tasks? This paper reports the results of a field experiment conducted with a manufacturer that uses wearable devices to distribute shop floor tasks. Drawing on theory on human motivation, we analyze 66,233 machine status reports and 31,429 work tasks completed in two manufacturing plants in Germany and Italy. We rely on a Difference-in-Differences approach in a 13-week-long field experiment. The results show that allowing workers to choose their next task shows no aggregate productivity difference but reveals heterogeneous behavioral effects. We find that workers respond more slowly to tasks (response time), but once accepted, tasks are completed faster (completion time). We discuss the potentially canceling effects and uncover evidence for behavioral mechanisms such as social loafing. This study has significant consequences for production managers in charge of implementing choice-based digital task assignment systems.