Getting Paid Immediately — How Does That Change Worker Behavior?

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Across thousands of employers, millions of U.S. workers can now access part or all of their earned pay immediately, rather than wait for the standard payday. These earned wage access programs, for Uber drivers at least, seem to make them want to:

Work less.

Work more.

The programs don’t affect hours worked.

Read on: That could be a game changer for some bosses. If you’ve ever had to beg an off-hours staffer to come to work right now because a dishwasher or a night nurse or a forklift driver didn’t show, you might appreciate a tool that motivates such cooperation.

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Human overconfidence is a much-studied phenomenon. And one theory holds that, given actual objective data about their abilities or performance, people would be more realistic. A study using more than 3,000 tournament-level chess players — a field with frequent, unbiased skill assessments — found that:

Nope. Hope — and self-delusion — springs eternal, and the chess players overestimated their abilities and chances of beating others.

It worked. Shown the data, players acknowledged their true abilities and their odds of winning a match.

Read on: But it feels good! A separate study on overconfidence found people with quite low skills but a lot of unwarranted confidence appeared exceptionally well-adjusted, reporting higher satisfaction with their lives, career and relationships.

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When publicly traded companies are in danger of missing an earnings target, and thus disappointing investors, they’ve been known to pull all sorts of tricks to make the number. A recent study found some companies facing that problem will allow more third-party tracking of customers who visit their websites, a well-known annoyance. Does the maneuver work?

It actually backfired, hurting traffic and causing a bigger earnings disappointment.

There was no discernible change in traffic, even though the third-party tracking subjected customers to those irritating ads that chase you around the internet.

It did work. Personalized ads, and more targeted spending by firms based on the tracking data, increased site visits by an average of about 15% in the month following above-average usage of consumer tracking.

Read on: Long-term, though, the strategy can drive away customers and also is associated with data breaches. A 2022 report from Verizon found that nearly two-thirds of data breaches came from third-party tracking embedded on sites.

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For the four main constituencies in the airline business — shareholders, employees, customers and suppliers — rank how they did in reaping rewards, net of losses realized, since deregulation of the industry in 1978.

Shareholders, customers, suppliers, employees.

Suppliers, employees, shareholders, customers.

Customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders.

Read on: Despite flyers’ love of complaining, it has been 40-plus years of lower airfares since deregulation — a huge win. Many employees lost parts of pensions during airline bankruptcies. Suppliers were hurt, too, by industry troubles. And most unhappy have been shareholders.

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Asked to compare a legal product against its illegal version, people seem to think which one is more effective?

The legal one.

The illegal one.

People rate them the same in efficacy.

Read on: The research suggests public health campaigns against illegal products may want to talk about their being ineffective, rather than dangerous.