We document how the procedure of allocating barely identical tasks among team members affects productivity and the willingness to pay for repeating the job alone rather than in teams. We find a complementarity relation between the assignment procedure (by-choice, imposed by a third party with a higher hierarchy, or random) and the preferences about the task to perform. For participants in the Imposed mechanism, being assigned to a preferred task increases performance, while being imposed on a non-preferred task negatively affects performance. Moreover, we find that the participants who were more interested in paying for autonomy were those randomly assigned to be autonomous (by-choice) at the beginning of the experiment. Hence, these results suggest that people care about factors beyond payoffs, such as autonomy. Among self-employed workers, the effect on the productivity of being imposed on a non-preferred task is exacerbated, and we did not find any statistical impact on the willingness to pay for playing alone.
