Responsibility-Alleviation and Other-Regarding Preferences with Peer Workers in Labor Markets: An Experimental Investigation

Mark Owens

Journal of Labor Research, 2012, vol. 33, issue 3, 353-369

Abstract: A peer worker is introduced in a controlled labor market experiment characterized by unobservable effort and incomplete contracts. Workers make decisions independently and without knowledge of each other’s actions in a modified gift exchange experiment. Introducing a peer worker into an ongoing market has a negative and significant effect on effort. This decrease in effort is consistent with responsibility-alleviation on the part of employees and not with other-regarding equity concerns for the manager’s payoffs. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012

Keywords: Peer effects; Responsibility-alleviation; Other-regarding behavior; Gift exchange; Experiment; D03; C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s12122-012-9138-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:jlabre:v:33:y:2012:i:3:p:353-369

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12122

DOI: 10.1007/s12122-012-9138-9

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Labor Research is currently edited by Ozkan Eren

More articles in Journal of Labor Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().