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Armouti-Hansen, Jesper ; Cassar, Lea ; Deréky, Anna ; Engl, Florian

Efficiency wages with motivated agents

Armouti-Hansen, Jesper, Cassar, Lea, Deréky, Anna and Engl, Florian (2024) Efficiency wages with motivated agents. Games and Economic Behavior 145, pp. 66-83.

Date of publication of this fulltext: 26 Mar 2024 10:09
Article
DOI to cite this document: 10.5283/epub.57986


Abstract

Many jobs serve a social purpose beyond profit maximization, contributing positively to society. This paper uses a modified principal-agent gift-exchange game with positive externality (prosocial treatment) to study how workers' prosocial motivation interacts with the use of efficiency wages in stimulating effort. We find that prosocial motivation and efficiency wages are independent in ...

Many jobs serve a social purpose beyond profit maximization, contributing positively to society. This paper uses a modified principal-agent gift-exchange game with positive externality (prosocial treatment) to study how workers' prosocial motivation interacts with the use of efficiency wages in stimulating effort. We find that prosocial motivation and efficiency wages are independent in stimulating effort: compared to a standard gift-exchange game (GE treatment), the presence of the externality shifts the agents' effort choice function upwards without affecting its slope. Thus, if principals were profit-maximizers, wage offers should be the same in both treatments. However, principals offer higher wages in the prosocial treatment. We show that this is due to principals in the GE treatment highly underestimating agents' reciprocity and thereby offering wages below the profit-maximizing level. Results from robustness-checks further suggest that our findings are unlikely to be driven by a simple efficiency effect.



Involved Institutions


Details

Item typeArticle
Journal or Publication TitleGames and Economic Behavior
Publisher:Elsevier
Volume:145
Page Range:pp. 66-83
Date16 March 2024
InstitutionsBusiness, Economics and Information Systems > Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre und Ökonometrie > Lehrstuhl für Empirische Wirtschaftsforschung - Prof. Lea Cassar
Identification Number
ValueType
10.1016/j.geb.2024.03.001DOI
Classification
NotationType
D23 M52Journal of Economics Literature Classification
KeywordsProsocial motivation, Gift exchange, Biased beliefs, Efficiency wages
Dewey Decimal Classification300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
StatusPublished
RefereedYes, this version has been refereed
Created at the University of RegensburgPartially
URN of the UB Regensburgurn:nbn:de:bvb:355-epub-579863
Item ID57986

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