Understanding differences between working in the public and private sectors is core to public management research. We assess the implications of a theory of public ownership, testing an expectation that work is of higher quality when performed under public ownership status compared to a private company. We conducted two, pre-registered, field experiments with a routine data processing task and workers recruited through an online labor market. Workers were randomly allocated information about the ownership status of a nursing home as either a public organization or private company. Work quality was measured as errors workers made in data entry and correcting pre-existing errors in work materials provided to them. The first experiment showed that fewer workers in the public, compared to the private, nursing home tended to make any data entry errors, but that they did not correct more existing errors. Exploratory analyses showed a greater effect for those aware of the organization’s ownership status. To test this apparent sector attention effect, we conducted a second experiment with a 2-by-2 factorial design randomly allocating workers to a treatment making salient the public or private sector status of the organization, in addition to the initial public or private sector treatment. The results confirmed the effect of public sector status and sector attention in combination; workers who were assigned to a public sector organization rather than a private company and who were made aware of the respective sector status were more likely to perform their work tasks without any errors. We discuss the limits of the findings and their implications including that public organizations could boost the quality of work done by making their sector status more explicit to workers.

中文翻译：

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公共部门和私营部门的工作质量有何不同？两次在线现场实验的证据

了解公共部门和私营部门工作之间的差异是公共管理研究的核心。我们评估了公有制理论的含义，测试了这样一种预期：与私营公司相比，在公有制状态下进行的工作质量更高。我们进行了两次预先注册的现场实验，其中包括常规数据处理任务和通过在线劳动力市场招聘的工人。工作人员被随机分配有关疗养院所有权状况的信息，无论是公共组织还是私营公司。工作质量是根据工作人员在数据输入中犯下的错误以及纠正提供给他们的工作材料中预先存在的错误来衡量的。第一个实验表明，与私人疗养院相比，公共场所的工作人员倾向于犯任何数据输入错误，但他们没有纠正更多现有的错误。探索性分析表明，对于那些了解组织所有权状况的人来说，影响更大。为了测试这种明显的部门关注效应，我们进行了第二次实验，采用 2×2 析因设计，除了最初的公共或私营部门待遇之外，还将工人随机分配到突出组织的公共或私营部门地位的待遇。结果证实了公共部门地位和部门关注的综合作用；被分配到公共​​部门组织而不是私营公司并且了解各自部门状况的工人更有可能在没有任何错误的情况下执行其工作任务。