The influence of potential on wages and effort

Gary Bolton () and Peter Werner

Experimental Economics, 2016, vol. 19, issue 3, No 2, 535-561

Abstract: Abstract We investigate how employee potential influences wage offers and effort exertion in a gift exchange experiment. In particular, we test if gift exchange based on a commonly accepted norm for wage differentiation can emerge in a setting where the wage demands of agents are heterogeneous. We also analyse how communication by principals responds to the unequal wage demands and how it influences agents’ decisions about working effort in the presence of varying degrees of bargaining power. We find that differences in productivity and the resulting entitlements lead to differentiation in wages. High productivity agents are offered substantially higher wages than low productivity agents. Results from a control experiment suggest that a large part of this wage markup is related to the future productivity potential of high performers. At the same time, unequal wage schemes do not substantially crowd out effort exertion: we observe no strong detrimental effects from disadvantageous relative wage positions. Certain communication patterns significantly influence effort exertion.

Keywords: Communication; Entitlements; Fairness norms; Gift exchange; Relative wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D63 J31 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10683-015-9453-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:kap:expeco:v:19:y:2016:i:3:d:10.1007_s10683-015-9453-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ry/journal/10683/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10683-015-9453-0

Access Statistics for this article

Experimental Economics is currently edited by David J. Cooper, Lata Gangadharan and Charles N. Noussair

More articles in Experimental Economics from Springer, Economic Science Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().