Homo Reciprocans Revisited

Jin Di Zheng

No 17-040/I, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: Do reciprocal workers work more if their wage compares well to similar workers in the economy? Are they more satisfied with their job? Predictions vary from theories. With a survey dataset with a representative sample of the German population, I construct a reference wage and measures for reciprocity for each worker. Depending on how much more or less a worker earns than the reference, I investigate how effort and job satisfaction react to reciprocity tendencies. The results suggest that a worker's unpaid overtime hours increase with her relative earnings if above the reference; and the more so, the stronger her positive reciprocity tendency is. However, there is no such interaction for negative reciprocity. Job satisfaction is associated with reciprocity, yet insensitive to the interaction between reciprocity and relative income.

Keywords: reciprocity; effort; satisfaction; reference wage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J3 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-04-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/17040.pdf (application/pdf)

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:tin:wpaper:20170040

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().