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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.
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| Item type | Article | ||||
| Journal or Publication Title | Games and Economic Behavior | ||||
| Publisher: | Elsevier | ||||
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| Volume: | 145 | ||||
| Page Range: | pp. 66-83 | ||||
| Date | 16 March 2024 | ||||
| Institutions | Business, Economics and Information Systems > Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre und Ökonometrie > Lehrstuhl für Empirische Wirtschaftsforschung - Prof. Lea Cassar | ||||
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| Classification |
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| Keywords | Prosocial motivation, Gift exchange, Biased beliefs, Efficiency wages | ||||
| Dewey Decimal Classification | 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics | ||||
| Status | Published | ||||
| Refereed | Yes, this version has been refereed | ||||
| Created at the University of Regensburg | Partially | ||||
| URN of the UB Regensburg | urn:nbn:de:bvb:355-epub-579863 | ||||
| Item ID | 57986 |
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