Paper: Ashraf, Bandiera, Davenport & Lee (2020)

"Losing Prosociality in the Quest for Talent? Sorting, Selection, and Productivity in the Delivery of Public Services", AER, 2020.
== Summary ==
=== Intro ===
=== I. Context and Research Design ===
==== I.B. Experimental Design ====
* Opening the selection channel: use two different paper recruitment posters posted in local public spaces as treatment and control (see image of posters below). They randomize treatment at the district level, evenly splitting 48 districts into two groups. 
** The 'treatment poster' stresses the civil service identitynow they suggest kind of an 'identity channel', where they previously interpret things as being affected by 'career opportunities', and 'prosociality'. It becomes confusing to me at this point what channels they want the reading to think about. of the new position, listing career advancement as the main benefit.
** The 'control poster' instead stresses the social identity, making salient community impact. 
* Closing the incentive channel:I'm slightly confused by the framing of this. If you just do treatment in the selection phase, it seems expected that after selection you're treating people the same. 'Closing' the incentive channel makes it sound like it would be open in the first place? That doesn't seem intuitive when framing an intervention in the selection process. Once hired, all employees are treated the same, so all eligible for career opportunities, all train together for one year during which they receive the same info about career opportunities. Since treatment and control selected workers have the same incentives after selection, performance differences—if any—are attributable to selection. They ask employees about the perceived benefits of they job when they first arrive at the training school (June 2011) and again 22 months later (April-May 2013). They do this by making the participants allocate 50 beans to different categories of job benefits, finding that there are differences in perceived benefits just after hiring, which disappear after the health workers are exposed to the training program. 
=== II. Framework ===
[THIS PART IS ACTUALLY PRETTY COOL]
The experiment can be modeled as a 3-stage game: (1) potential applicants decide to apply or not based on the info conveyed by the posters, (2) applicants are hired, and (3) hired applicants decide how much effort to exert on the job. 
*
=== III. Treatment Effect on the Applicant Pool and Selected Candidates ===
=== IV. Inputs in Service Delivery ===
=== V. Facility Utilization, Health Practices, and Health Outcomes ===
=== VI. Conclusion ===
== Thoughts/Remarks ==
* To what extent is this measuring how people respond to differences in prosociality? If I understand correctly, in treatment people are told they will work for the government, while in control they won't. That might produce other associations and behavior related to government versus private sector/NGO work?
* On the one hand they talk about the effect of varying 'career opportunities' (last line p.1357) and on the other hand about 'prosociality'. These are different interpretations of the same experimental treatment. The framing in the experiment of varying both career opportunities and prosociality, makes that the effects we find are the combined effect of both?