In the Spanish citrus industry, the salary structure incentivises quantity over quality, so the incentives of the workers picking up the fruits are not fully aligned with the manager’s incentives. The worker unions have a strong bargaining power in the sector, and they do not allow quality-adjusted wages. Hence, the research question is whether other types of incentives could help balance the quantity vs. quality trade-off. And, if so, which types and how we should design them. 

I am going to collaborate with multiple large citrus producers in Spain to run a field experiment to investigate the efficacy of different compensation schemes to incentivise the performance of seasonal workers in teams. Additionally, I will run surveys with the workers to get richer data on worker and team characteristics. Moreover, I will also do a theoretical model to formulate hypotheses to be tested in the experiment and to generalise the results.

A key contribution of this project is that we have two different factors, quantity and quality, that are crucial for the firms’ productivity, and the structure and rigidity of the sector make us incentivise each of them through a different mechanism. Moreover, with the survey and the corporate data, I will be able to provide insights on personal and team characteristics that might matter for the efficacy of the incentive.