Can paying employees to quit boost motivation? Evidence from a lab experiment

We investigate whether pay-to-quit incentives can enhance worker productivity by conducting an online laboratory experiment with 1000 participants. Subjects were randomly assigned to either a control condition, which offered no financial inducement to quit, or to a treatment condition in which they received a one-time offer of CHF 5 ($ 6.16) to exit the task. While our design does not allow a clean decomposition of the total treatment effect into separate motivational and selection components our findings indicate that participants who reject the quit offer complete, on average, 33% more tasks than those in the control group. The evidence suggests that the foregone quit payment establishes a salient reference point, thereby inducing increased effort and a higher likelihood of surpassing performance thresholds. This study contributes to both behavioral decision research and the practice of personnel management by elucidating how a seemingly counterintuitive incentive can have dual effects: screening out less-committed employees and motivating those who remain to invest greater effort. • Pay-to-quit offers increase task completion by 33% among individuals who reject them. • Resisting a quit offer enhances effort, task persistence, and output through motivational reference points. • Reference dependence and regret aversion, rather than only selection, explain some productivity gains, though the design does not cleanly decompose these effects. • Social framing and encouragement amplify the motivational impact of the quit offer. • Pay-to-quit schemes can screen for commitment and strengthen motivation without increasing ongoing compensation costs.