Losing Prosociality in the Quest for Talent? - Sorting, Selection, and Productivity in the Delivery of Public Services

Sep 18, 2026

A field experiment embedded in a nationwide recruitment drive in Zambia tests whether career benefits attract talent at the expense of prosocial motivation. Offering career opportunities reduces prosocial applicants only when talent is low; marginal treatment applicants are more talented and remain equally prosocial. The hired agents deliver better outcomes throughout the causal chain: more inputs, higher facility utilization, and improved health results, including a 25% reduction in child malnutrition. The study examines professionalization of public service delivery and the implied trade-off between qualifications and intrinsic motivation.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages40

Reading Time1 h 41 min

AccessFree to download

Key question and setting

Career benefits versus prosocial motivation

Experimental design

Recruitment advertisements and treatment vs. control districts

Training to isolate selection from job incentives

Findings and implications

Talent-skill trade-off and performance outcomes

Health impacts, including child malnutrition reduction

American Economic Review 2020, 110(5): 1355–1394 [https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20180326](https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20180326) Losing Prosociality in the Quest for Talent? Sorting, Selection, and Productivity in the Delivery of Public Services† By Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Edward Davenport, and Scott S. Lee* We embed afield experiment in a nationwide recruitment drive fora new health care position in Zambia to test whether career benefits attract talent at the expense of prosocial motivation. In line with common wisdom, offering career opportunities attracts less prosocial applicants. However, the trade-off exists only at low levels of talent; the marginal applicants in treatment are more talented and equally prosocial. These are hired, and perform better at every step of the causal chain: they provide more inputs, increase facility utilization, and improve health outcomes including a 25 percent decrease in child malnutrition. (JEL H83, I11, I13, J24, M51, O15, Z13) Economic development entails the professionalization of public service delivery, whereby career professionals replace informal local providers (Northcote and Trevelyan 1853, Weber 1922, North 1991). This has raised concerns of a possible trade-off between qualifications and skills on the one hand, and intrinsic motivation and local rapport on the other. In other words, does a career in the civil service attract talent at the expense of prosociality? 1 *Ashraf: Department of Economics, LSE (email: [n.ashraf1@lse.ac.uk](n.ashraf1@lse.ac.uk)); Bandiera: Department of Economics, LSE, and STICERD ([email: o.bandiera@lse.ac.uk](email: o.bandiera@lse.ac.uk)); Davenport: Department of Economics, MIT (email: edav@mit. edu); Lee: Department of Medicine and Institute for Global Health, Vanderbilt University (email: ssl@mail.harvard. edu) . Roland Bénabou was the coeditor for this article. We thank the Ministry of Health of Zambia and especially Mutinta Musonda for partnership on this project. We thank the IGC, J-PAL Governance Initiative, USAID, and HBS DFRD for financial support. We also thank Robert Akerlof, Charles Angelucci, Tim Besley, Robin Burgess, Paul Gertler, Edward Glaeser, Kelsey Jack, Giacomo Ponzetto, Imran Rasul, Jonah Rockoff, and seminar participants at several institutions for useful comments. Adam Grant, Amy Wrzesniewski, and Patricia Satterstrom kindly provided guidance on psychological measurement. We thank Kristin Johnson, Conceptor Chilopa, Mardieh Dennis, Madeleen Husselman, Alister Kandyata, Allan Lalisan, Mashekwa Maboshe, Elena Moroz, Shotaro Nakamura, Sara Lowes, and Sandy Tsai for the excellent research assistance and the Clinton Health Access Initiative in Zambia for their collaboration. IRB approval was obtained from Harvard University, Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research, and University of Zambia, Biomedical Research Ethics Committee. This study is registered in theAEA RCT Registry and the unique identifying number is AEARCTR-0000064. The authors declare that they have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. †Go to [https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20180326](https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20180326) to visit the article page for additional materials and author disclosure statements. 1 Ambition toward a career in public service, with both its ability to attract the most able but also the most self-interested, has a long intellectual history; ambition was used by Romans, as ambitio, exclusively to refer to those in public life. In De officiis, Cicero referred to ambitio as a “malady” that can cause individuals to “lose sight of their claims to justice,” but one that seems to draw “the greatest souls” and “most brilliant geniuses”(King 2013) . 1356 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW MAY 2020 We design a field experiment as part of a nationwide recruitment drive for a new health care position in Zambia to test whether career benefits attract talent at the expense of

FAQs

What does the study investigate about career opportunities and prosocial motivation?

It tests whether career benefits attract talent in a way that reduces prosocial motivation when recruiting for a new public health care position in Zambia.

How does the recruitment intervention differ between control and treatment districts?

Control ads emphasize helping the community and list local agents as peers, while treatment ads highlight career advancement within government and list doctors and nurses as peers.

What evidence does the study provide that selection affects performance rather than incentives on the job?

All hired agents receive the same information on career opportunities and are trained together for one year before deployment, so post-training perceptions converge across groups.

What impact do the hired agents have on health outcomes?

Treatment-hired agents improve performance across the causal chain and lead to a 25% decrease in child malnutrition.

Sep 18, 2026

Uploaded by Arica Lee