Monetary-Incentive Competition Between Humans and Robots: Experimental Results

In a controlled experiment, participants ( n=60) competed in a monotonous task with an autonomous robot for real monetary incentives. For each participant, we manipulated the robot's performance and the monetary incentive level across ten rounds. In each round, a participant's performance compared to the robot's would affect their odds in a lottery for the monetary prize. Standard economic theory predicts that people's effort will increase with prize value. Furthermore, recent work in behavioral economics predicts that there will also be a discouragement effect, with stronger robot performance discouraging human effort, and that this effect will increase with prize. We were not able to detect a meaningful effect of monetary prize, but we found a small discouragement effect, with human effort decreasing with increased robot performance, significant at the level. Using per-round subjective indicators, we also found a positive effect of robot performance on its perceived competence, a negative effect on the participants' liking of the robot, and a negative effect on the participants' own competence, all at . These findings shed light on how people may exert work effort and perceive robotic competitors in a human-robot workforce, and could have implications on labor supply decisions and the design of compensation schemes in the workplace.

I. Introduction

In this paper, we present an experiment studying the effort of people competing for a real monetary prize with a robot, and how the robot's performance affects people's effort and their attitude toward the robot. People compete with each other in workplaces, politics, sports, and other contexts, both for monetary and non-monetary gains. When humans make decisions on whether and how much to invest in a competitive task, they can be motivated by several factors. Traditional economic models of decision-making often focus exclusively on the direct value of the reward for the task. However, recent work in behavioral economics highlights additional considerations, in particular, that the psychological value of winning a reward can be affected by prior expectations. These motivations are not just important to the individual, but also to society at large as they affect labor supply decisions and the design of compensation schemes in the workplace.