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We report experimental findings on the role of social information and esteem for prosocial behavior of clinicians in Tanzania. For this we conduct a lab experiment on variants of a dictator game, which allows us to classify types of clinicians by their responses to being chosen by their partner and to knowing more about the person they are paired with. We link this lab data to the effort exerted by the same sample of clinicians to their patients in the field. We show that clinicians who are responsive both to information and to being chosen in the lab exert more average effort in the field. Responsiveness to being chosen is also correlated with a smaller variance of effort in the field, while variance is larger for clinicians who respond to social information. Our combination of lab and field results suggests that behavioral traits identified in the lab are informative of clinician’ choices in their actual workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We test the value of unconditional non-monetary gifts as a way to improve health worker performance in a low income country health setting. We randomly assigned health workers to different gift treatments within a program that visited health workers, measured performance and encouraged them to provide high quality care for their patients. We show that unconditional non-monetary gifts improve performance by 20 percent over a six-week period, compared to the control group. We compare the impact of the unconditional gift to one in which a gift is offered conditional on meeting a performance target and show that only the unconditional gift results in a statistically significant improvement. This demonstrates that organizations can improve the performance of health workers in the medium term without using financial incentives., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)