Social Comparison and Performance: Experimental Evidence on the Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis

Christian Thöni and Simon Gächter

University of St. Gallen Department of Economics working paper series 2009 from Department of Economics, University of St. Gallen

Abstract: We investigate the impact of wage comparisons for worker productivity. We present three studies which all use three-person gift-exchange experiments. Consistent with Akerlof and Yellen's (1990) fair wage-effort hypothesis we find that disadvantageous wage discrimination leads to lower efforts while advantageous wage discrimination does not increase efforts on average. Two studies allow us to measure wage comparison effects at the individual level. We observe strongly heterogeneous wage comparison effects. We also find that reactions to wage discrimination can be attributed to the underlying intentions of discrimination rather than to payoff consequences.

Keywords: fair wage-effort hypothesis; wage comparison; gift exchange; horizontal fairness; discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 J31 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2009-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-lab and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ux-tauri.unisg.ch/RePEc/usg/dp2009/DP-0929-Th.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Social comparison and performance: Experimental evidence on the fair wage-effort hypothesis (2010)
Working Paper: Social Comparison and Performance: Experimental Evidence on the Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis (2010)
Working Paper: Social Comparison and Performance: Experimental Evidence on the Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis (2010)
Working Paper: Social Comparison and Performance: Experimental Evidence on the Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis (2009)
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:usg:dp2009:2009-29

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of St. Gallen Department of Economics working paper series 2009 from Department of Economics, University of St. Gallen Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Martina Flockerzi ().