Count Your Losses, and Cut Your Blessings: Reference Dependence across Intertemporal and Uncompensated Labor Supply (opens in new tab)

Do workers always work more for more? We investigate how intertemporal and uncompensated labor supply decisions change across observational and experimental windows, within the same workers. Combining a real-effort emoji-counting experiment on Prolific with observational data from platform administrative records, self-reported expectations and recalls, and smartphone-based screen-time logs, we find that expectations, and how easily accessible th...