Towards an understanding of the relative strengths of positive and negative reciprocity
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2010, Vol 5, Issue 7
Abstract
Scholars in economics and psychology have created a large literature studying reward, punishment and reciprocity. Labor markets constitute a popular application of this body of work, with particular emphasis on how reciprocity helps regulate workplace relationships where managers are unable to perfectly monitor workers. We study how idiosyncratic features of the labor market (compared to most scenarios in which reciprocity applies) affect the nature of worker reciprocity. In particular, we show how having an excess supply of workers (simulating unemployment) and managers who can observe the reciprocal behavior of workers and hire/fire them on that basis (simulating the reputational concerns inherent in labor market transactions) profoundly alters worker reciprocity. In the absence of reputational concerns, workers tend to reward kind behavior and punish unkind behavior by managers in approximately equal measure. In the presence of reputational concerns, workers exhibit a marked increase (decrease) in the propensity to reward kind (punish unkind) behavior by managers. We demonstrate how this is a consequence of workers and managers responding to changes in the strategic incentives to reward and punish.
Authors and Affiliations
Omar Al-Ubaydli, Uri Gneezy, Min Sok Lee and John A. List
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677772
- DOI -
- Views 119
- Downloads 0
The wisdom of ignorant crowds: Predicting sport outcomes by mere recognition
The collective recognition heuristic is a simple forecasting heuristic that bets on the fact that people’s recognition knowledge of names is a proxy for their competitiveness: In sports, it predicts that the better-known...
Are complex decisions better left to the unconscious? Further failed replications of the deliberation-without-attention effect
The deliberation-without-attention effect occurs when better decisions are made when people experience a period of distraction before a decision than when they make decisions immediately or when they spend time reflectin...
Regret salience and accountability in the decoy effect
Two experiments examined the impact on the decoy effect of making salient the possibility of post-decision regret, a manipulation that has been shown in several earlier studies to stimulate critical examination and impro...
It’s not right but it’s permitted: Wording effects in moral judgement
This study aims to provide evidence about two widely held assumptions in the experimental study of moral judgment. First, that different terms used to ask for moral judgment (e.g., blame, wrongness, permissibility…) can...
The retrospective gambler’s fallacy: Unlikely events, constructing the past, and multiple universes
The gambler’s fallacy (Tune, 1964) refers to the belief that a streak is more likely to end than chance would dictate. In three studies, participants exhibited a retrospective gambler’s fallacy (RGF) in which an event th...