A crowdsourced nickel‐and‐dime approach to analog OBM research: A behavioral economic framework for understanding workforce attrition
A five-cent raise can cut dropout in half when tasks get tough.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Henley’s team paid online adults to press keys for tiny cash.
Half got 5¢ every few responses. Half got 10¢.
The work got harder each round. The researchers counted who quit.
What they found
The 10¢ group stayed longer. The 5¢ group dropped out faster.
Doubling the penny reward cut attrition without extra training or prompts.
How this fits with other research
Wine (2025) later asked office workers to file papers for $2.11 a shift. That real-world test shows the same rule: a small raise keeps people working.
Batchelder et al. (2023) used rising step-count goals and rising cash. More money meant more steps, echoing Henley’s stay-longer effect.
Wine et al. (2019) found workers still tried hard when pay came a month late. Together the papers say size matters more than speed of delivery.
Why it matters
You can keep staff or clients engaged by nudging pay up just a little. In clinics, schools, or telehealth jobs, raise the token value, not the praise volume. Try it next time a learner starts skipping sessions.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Incentives are a popular method to achieve desired employee performance; however, research on optimal incentive magnitude is lacking. Behavioral economic demand curves model persistence of responding in the face of increasing cost and may be suitable to examine the reinforcing value of incentives on work performance. The present use-inspired basic study integrated an experiential human operant task within a crowdsourcing platform to evaluate the applicability of behavioral economics for quantifying changes in workforce attrition. Participants included 88 Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers who earned either a $0.05 or $0.10 incentive for completing a progressively increasing response requirement. Analyses revealed statistically significant differences in breakpoint between the two groups. Additionally, a novel translation of the Kaplan-Meier survival-curve analyses for use within a demand curve framework allowed for examination of elasticity of workforce attrition. Results indicate greater inelastic attrition in the $0.05 group. We discuss the benefits of a behavioral economic approach to modeling employee behavior, how the metrics obtained from the elasticity of workforce attrition analyses (e.g., P max ) may be used to set goals for employee behavior while balancing organizational costs, and how economy type may have influenced observed outcomes.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2016 · doi:10.1002/jeab.220