Tipping customs: The effects of national differences in attitudes toward tipping and sensitivities to duty and social pressure

Michael Lynn and Mark M. Starbuck

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2015, vol. 57, issue C, 158-166

Abstract: Consumers around the world often give voluntary sums of money (called “tips”) to the service workers who have served them, but the set of tipped professions and the amounts tipped to any one profession differ from country to country. One explanation for these national differences in tipping customs is that they reflect national differences in attitude toward tipping, sensitivity to duty/obligation to tip, and sensitivity to social pressure to tip. Furthermore, these variables have been hypothesized to mediate the previously observed effects on tipping customs of national extraversion, psychoticism and neuroticism respectively. Analyses of secondary data found support for these explanations of national differences in tipping customs, but only partial support for their roles as mediators of national personality effects on tipping customs. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed along with study limitations and directions for future research.

Keywords: Tipping; Social norms; National differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804314000949
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:57:y:2015:i:c:p:158-166

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2014.07.005

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().