TY - JOUR
T1 - Responsibility-Alleviation and Other-Regarding Preferences with Peer Workers in Labor Markets
T2 - An Experimental Investigation
AU - Owens, Mark F.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research has been partially supported by a Faculty Research and Creative Projects Grant at Middle Tennessee State University and by the Department of Economics at Ohio State University. The author thanks John Kagel for his help and financial support, Adam Hogan for valuable research assistance and Susan Rose and J. Laron Kirby for their help in conducting experiments. All experimental materials, instructions and data are available upon request from the author at: [email protected].
PY - 2012/9
Y1 - 2012/9
N2 - A peer worker is introduced in a controlled labor market experiment characterized by unobservable effort and incomplete contracts. Workers make decisions independently and without knowledge of each other's actions in a modified gift exchange experiment. Introducing a peer worker into an ongoing market has a negative and significant effect on effort. This decrease in effort is consistent with responsibility-alleviation on the part of employees and not with other-regarding equity concerns for the manager's payoffs.
AB - A peer worker is introduced in a controlled labor market experiment characterized by unobservable effort and incomplete contracts. Workers make decisions independently and without knowledge of each other's actions in a modified gift exchange experiment. Introducing a peer worker into an ongoing market has a negative and significant effect on effort. This decrease in effort is consistent with responsibility-alleviation on the part of employees and not with other-regarding equity concerns for the manager's payoffs.
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U2 - 10.1007/s12122-012-9138-9
DO - 10.1007/s12122-012-9138-9
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84865578424
SN - 0195-3613
VL - 33
SP - 353
EP - 369
JO - Journal of Labor Research
JF - Journal of Labor Research
IS - 3
ER -