Managing Efforts and Expectations Over Time: an Experiment

This paper studies how individuals behave during a long performance task. We examine how they provide effort, form expectations and how these features can influence the final result of such a task. In a field experiment, involving 43 students, we use a special valuation technique to elicit their level of the effort provision and surveys to collect their expectations about the final result. In this setting, we found that expectations are constant over time. They may act as motivation for an individual because we reveal that the higher goal people set to achieve, the higher effort they provide. We observe the presence of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which states that quality of expectations significantly depends on the level of the abilities of an individual — higher-skilled people tend to make more accurate and precise predictions. Finally, we derived that the final result depends on both abilities and level of the exerted effort. We do not observe any gender differences in the effort provision level and expectations formation, which is a result contrary to previous studies.