Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/94164
Year of Publication: 
2005
Series/Report no.: 
SFB/TR 15 Discussion Paper No. 55
Publisher: 
Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio 15 - Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems (GESY), München
Abstract: 
We present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations on actual work effort of employees with hourly wages. Work effort neither reacts to an increase of the own wage, nor to a positive or negative peer comparison. This result seems at odds with numerous laboratory experiments that show a clear own wage sensitivity on effort. In an additional real-effort laboratory experiment we show that explicit cost and surplus information that enables to exactly calculate employer's surplus from the work contract is a crucial pre-requisite for a positive wage-effort relation. This demonstrates that employee's reciprocity requires a clear assessment of the surplus at stake.
Subjects: 
efficiency wage
reciprocity
fairness
field experiment
real effort
JEL: 
C91
C92
J41
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.