Data-entry workers in Mysore chose to be penalized for slow days, and typed more

Given the chance to set their own daily output target and lose half their piece-rate pay on any day they missed it, data-entry workers at a firm in Mysore, India, chose that penalty 36 percent of the time, and workers who accepted a target produced about 6 percent more output. The result, from Supreet Kaur, Michael Kremer and Sendhil Mullainathan’s 2015 Journal of Political Economy paper “Self-Control at Work,” is one of the cleaner demonstrations that some people will pay to be held to their own word.

The pay slip behind the experiment

Workers at the firm sat in front of scanned forms and typed what they saw into fields on a screen. Each accurate field paid 0.03 rupees. A flat 15-rupee show-up fee made up about 8 percent of what they took home, and nothing was paid for a day of absence. Accuracy was checked by entering every form twice and sending mismatches to a separate quality team. The software showed each worker their running count with roughly a 15-minute delay.

The researchers ran their own operation inside that firm’s building for 13 months, using its office, software and procedures. The sample behind the main results is 102 workers and 8,423 worker-days from the eight months when both of their treatments ran side by side. Workers who listed an age on their resumes averaged 24, the group averaged 13 years of schooling, and about three-quarters were men. They had been told the job was a one-time contract with no reference letter at the end, which weakens any career reason to impress the firm.

Two things were randomized. The first was payday. Everyone was paid weekly, but the weekday varied by group: Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday evenings, for the previous seven days of work.

The second was the contract, assigned fresh each day. On some days workers got the ordinary rate. On others they were given a target, drawn from levels that began at 3,000, 4,000 and 5,000 accurate fields (in the first month, roughly the 30th, 50th and 70th percentiles of output; the levels were adjusted as the project went on). Hit the target and the full 0.03 rupees applied to every field. Miss it and each field paid half. That is the “dominated” contract of the title: at any output level, it pays the same as the ordinary rate or less, never more.

The test sat in two further treatments, where workers picked their own target, including zero, which meant the ordinary contract. In one, they chose in the morning on arrival. In the other, they chose the evening before.

What did the workers choose?

They picked a positive target, and so accepted the possibility of a pay cut, 36 percent of the time. The authors note that a worker who never struggled to get started on a task would have no reason to do this, since the contract offers no upside. Their theory is that a worker aware of his own habit of coasting values a penalty that bites on his future self. In their words, “sophisticated workers may voluntarily choose a dominated contract.”

The output effect was real. For workers who took up the option, production rose by about 6 percent. The authors benchmark that against an exogenous change in the piece rate: a gain of that size would otherwise take an 18 percent raise. They also describe it as a lower bound on how much the workers over-weighted the present, because it implies workers valued the benefit of future effort at least 18 percent more when picking a contract than when actually working.

Why paydays mattered

The second experiment is in a way the sharper one. Output was 8 percent higher on payday than at the start of the weekly cycle, even though payday was randomly assigned and the weekly pay was identical. The authors show that an 8 percent rise toward payday would need an exponential discount rate of 4 percent per day to be explained by ordinary discounting, which they read as ruling that explanation out. In plain terms, workers typed more as the day they were paid came nearer, for the same money.

By the authors’ wage-change estimates, an 8 percent payday effect matches the output gain from a 24 percent raise in the piece rate.

The two findings travel together. Workers with above-average payday effects were 49 percent more likely to choose targets, and when handed the option, their output rose 9 percent, or 28 percent for those who actually took it. That last number matches what an 85 percent piece-rate increase would have bought. Demand for the contract was learned: early in the job many workers tried it, and after two months, those with high payday effects were 20 percentage points (73 percent) more likely to select it than those with low ones.

One result that did not fit

If a worker wants to bind a distant self more than a near one, he should choose targets more often the evening before than the morning of. The data show about the same take-up in both. The authors’ explanation, reached after the fact, is that output on any day depends on things nobody controls in advance: network speed, a late bus, a slow computer. Choosing in the evening meant betting on conditions unknown until arrival. Where uncertainty was low, the evening choice did appear more often. They flag this as a post-hoc reading, so it should be treated as a hypothesis.

A factory floor in Belfast, 1890s

The paper’s final pages carry a historical echo. Gregory Clark, in a 1994 article cited by the authors, reports that among 32 linen mills in Belfast in the 1890s, 29 fined workers for minor tardiness and 21 locked out pieceworkers who arrived a few minutes late, which cost the mill that worker’s entire day of output. Clark’s reading, which the authors take seriously, is that workers who had once kept “St. Monday” and sometimes Tuesday as days off may have valued those rules. The firm’s strictness and the workers’ preferences pointed the same way.

That is a more interesting claim than the usual story of factory discipline imposed from above. It is also contested: Marglin and Thompson, whom the authors name, read the same rules as a tool of capital. The Mysore experiment cannot settle that history. What it adds is a reason to think that at least some workers might welcome a rule against themselves.

What the study cannot say

Several limits matter before anyone borrows this for their own mornings.

And the penalty here was a pay cut set by the worker but enforced by the firm. A penalty can also change meaning depending on who sets it. In the Israeli daycare experiment retold in this explainer on fines and prices, a fine imposed on late parents made lateness more common, because parents began treating it as a fee. In Mysore the workers chose their own rule, which may be why it did not turn into a price.

The 36 percent figure means 64 percent of choices were for the ordinary contract. Plenty of workers did not want a penalty, and the survey at the end shows a split: 78 percent agreed with “Some days I don’t work as hard as I would like to,” and 87 percent with “I wish I had better attendance at work,” yet 70 percent said rules against absence would help them come in more, while 24 percent disagreed. Wanting help is not universal.

It is one firm in one data-entry hub, over about a year, with young workers who knew the job was temporary. The authors also report that neither effect was well predicted by standard lab measures, such as choosing cash now or later: present-focused effort did not line up with present-focused money.

Related evidence

The paper’s footnotes cite Ariely and Wertenbroch’s 2002 proofreading experiment, in which students allowed to set their own deadlines did better than those given none. Psychological Science retracted that study on September 2, 2026, after a failed replication and data-forensics analyses by Data Colada, so it no longer counts as support. The Mysore data were collected independently and the retraction does not touch them, which is a reason to give more weight to field results with real pay and long durations. The site’s post on Parkinson’s law and the retracted deadline study picks up the retraction.