Does pay inequality affect worker effort? Experimental evidence

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Charness, Gary; Kuhn, Peter
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF LABOR ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0734-306X
• DOI: 10.1086/519540
• 发表日期: 2007
• 页码: 693-723
• 关键词: social preferences; MARKET; fairness

摘要

We study worker behavior in an efficiency- wage environment in which coworkers' wages can influence a worker's effort. Theoretically, we show that an increase in workers' responsiveness to coworkers' wages should lead profit-maximizing firms to compress wages. Our laboratory experiments, by contrast, show that while workers' effort choices are highly sensitive to their own wages, effort is not affected by coworkers' wages. This casts doubt on the notion that workers' concerns with equity might explain pay policies such as wage compression or wage secrecy.